New Books Network Jason Roberts, "We Stay the Same: Subsistence, Logging, and Enduring Hopes for Development in Papua New Guinea" (U Arizona Press, 2024)
Feb 2, 2026
Jason S. Roberts, a political ecologist and anthropologist who studies resource extraction and development, discusses life on New Hanover, Papua New Guinea. He explores logging’s ecological toll and failed agroforestry schemes. He traces how hopes for development are formed, frustrated, and repeatedly renewed. He also describes subsistence resilience amid dispossession and unequal distribution of benefits.
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Stagnation As Local Diagnosis
- 'Mipe Staposum' (We stay the same) captures locals' sense that development projects often fail to change everyday life.
- That phrase frames how promises of logging and agroforestry reproduce stagnation despite repeated interventions.
Entry Through A Local Mentor
- Roberts describes being introduced to New Hanover by a local leader who mentored him and became a long-term collaborator.
- That relationship opened access and shaped his ethnographic work over many years.
Subsistence Meets Desire For Modernity
- Lavongai livelihoods center on shifting cultivation and fishing, providing resilient but labour-intensive subsistence.
- Exposure to outsiders and missionary narratives made modern comforts deeply desirable alongside subsistence security.
