The Geographical Journal, Vol. 175, No. 2, June 2009, pp. 98–111 doi: 10.1111/j.1475-4959.2008.00319.x Geographical Journal Vol. 175, No. 2, pp. 98–111, 2009 © 2009 The Author(s). Journal compilation © 2009 The Royal Geographical Society Blackwell Publishing Ltd Finding common ground: relational concepts of land tenure and economy in the oil palm frontier of Papua New Guinea GEORGE N CURRY AND GINA KOCZBERSKI Department of Social Sciences, Curtin University of Technology, GPO Box U1987, Perth, WA 6845, Australia E-mail: g.curry@curtin.edu.au; g.koczberski@curtin.edu.au This paper was accepted for publication in November 2008 In the oil palm frontier regions of West New Britain and Oro provinces, Papua New Guinea, customary land tenure arrangements are changing in response to the growing demand for land for agricultural development. This paper examines one aspect of these changes, namely the gifting and selling of customary land for oil palm development to people who have no customary birthrights to the land. By analysing how access rights are maintained over the relatively long cultivation cycle of oil palm (approximately 25 years), and in the context of the rapidly changing socio-economic and demographic environments of the oil palm frontiers, the paper demonstrates that while land transactions seemingly entail the commodification of land, land rights and security of land tenure remain embedded in social relationships. For customary landowners, the moral basis of land rights is contingent on ‘outsiders’ maintaining particular kinds of social and economic relationships with their customary landowning ‘hosts’. In exploring how these social relationships are constituted through the performance of particular kinds of exchange relationships, the paper provides insights into relational concepts of land rights and how these are able to persist in Papua New Guinea’s oil palm frontier regions where resource struggles are often intense and where large migrant populations are seeking land for agricultural development. KEY WORDS: Papua New Guinea, land tenure, migration and ethnicity, social embeddedness, relational concepts of economy Introduction T here is growing appreciation within geography of the value of relational concepts of the economy for providing theoretical insights into processes of economic change. Relational perspec- tives are now influencing research in a variety of contexts in both developed and developing countries (e.g. Amin and Thrift 1992; Lee and Wills 1997; Leyshon 1997; Curry 2003; Yeung 2005a 2005b; Gill 2005; Connell 2007; Sidaway 2007), with much of this work drawing its inspiration from economic sociology and anthropology. Relational perspectives offer some advantages over under-socialised perspectives like neoclassical economics and political economy for the study of resources, communities, institutions, firms and places. Boggs and Rantisi (2003) contend that in contrast to structural approaches, relational perspectives pay more attention to the role of agency in economic analysis with greater methodological emphasis on the micro level. Furthermore, as Boggs and Rantisi (2003, 114) note, rather than privileging one scale, a priori, relational perspectives consider the interre- lations of global and local networks and scales. While it could be argued that some aspects of a relational approach are present in other approaches in geography, one key potential contribution of a relational perspective lies in its capacity to reveal how economy and society are co-constituted. This requires exploring how economic forms, activities and relationships are constructed from social relation- ships, rather than maintaining the conceptual distinction between the economic and the social