________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthopology 2(2) 2001:44-67 ‘WHERE’S OUR DEVELOPMENT?’ Landowner aspirations and environmentalist agendas in Western Solomon Islands Simon Foale INTRODUCTION In the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s a number of large, globally influential environmental organisations attempted to encourage Melanesian landowners to come to a ‘compromise’ between hands-off conservation and unsustainable ‘development’, through a variety of ‘Integrated Conservation and Development’ (ICAD) experiments (Ellis 1997; McCallum and Sekhran 1997; Filer with Sekhran 1998:263-77; Van Helden 1998:1-6). The idea was generally to try to lure landowners away from embracing highly destructive — but relatively lucrative — industrial developments, primarily round-logging operations, which were, and still are, almost entirely controlled by powerful and unscrupulous multinational companies. The strategy for getting landowners to eschew logging generally took the form of first, convincing them of the ‘value’ of the biodiversity that they were saving by not allowing their rainforests to be logged, and second, offering various forms of assistance and incentives for embarking on alternative, ecologically and economically sustainable development ventures such as ecoforestry and ecotourism. The design of these community-based alternative developments tended to assume the existence of a certain level of cooperative behaviour — underpinned by communitarian attitudes or notions of ‘public good’ — that are not necessarily present in the social organisation of these communities. I wish to examine the values of conservationists and landowners regarding biodiversity, as well as the mismatch between conservationist expectations of communitarianism and some of the social realities I observed while working with communities in the Western Solomon Islands. Between April 1999 and May 2001 I was employed by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF — formerly called the World Wildlife Fund) for the final two years of a five-year ‘conservation and development’ project. In 1995, the WWF South Pacific Program initiated the ‘Solomon Islands Community Resource Conservation and Development Project’ (SI-CRCDP, hereinafter referred to as ‘the project’) in the Western Province of Solomon