Women Market Vendors as Citizens: An Exploration of Governance in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea

Abstract

Urban poverty and concomitant social, economic and political inequalities are deepening globally. Moreover, urban poverty is increasingly recognised as a real and urgent issue within the Pacific region. The nature and extent of engagement between governance, understood as the interactive relationships between and within government and non-government actors, and citizens is seen to variously exacerbate and mitigate urban poverty. Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, provides a complex and compelling site for this research. Urbanisation is presenting multiple challenges in Port Moresby as a burgeoning population competes for limited resources, strained infrastructure and few opportunities for formal employment. Current constellations of governance are positioning Port Moresby‟s informal economy, and in particular marketplaces, as pivotal to the city‟s development. Moreover, there is an identified need to focus on Port Moresby‟s women market vendors, who negotiate overlapping marginalities, as strategic social and economic actors. Alongside an engagement with the two key concepts that ground this research, citizenship and governance, and the collection and analysis of key policy documents, this research is strengthened by a period of fieldwork. This research draws from data collected through semi-structured interviews with a number of principal institutions contributing to different forms of governance in Port Moresby. This research highlights the gap between policy aspiration and policy implementation and considers how an apparent disjuncture between national and sub-national institutions in Port Moresby is impacting the ways these institutions are engaging with women market vendors in the city. Marketplaces are highly complex sites; distinctions of what constitutes formal and informal marketplaces, differing notions of community, and perceptions of marketplaces as causally linked with urban crime and disorder emerge as just some of the critical issues shaping the extent to which institutions contributing to different forms of governance are constructing Port Moresby‟s women market vendors as citizens.