Local level order-making: Lessons from Melanesia

2024 CAP Professorial Lecture Series 
This lecture series aims to celebrate our esteemed academics and showcase their areas of expertise in research and teaching.

Agenda 

• 6-7.15pm - Academic Lecture
• 7.15-8pm - Networking drinks and canapés 

Local level order-making: Lessons from Melanesia

Community-initiated governance and regulatory experimentation is happening in many parts of the Pacific, typically in rural areas where state presence is limited but also in many urban settlements. Such experimentation takes diverse forms, often including local committees and unofficial laws drawing on different sources of authority to regulate behaviour within a given community. While there are historical precedents in colonial systems of indirect rule, today's experimentation speaks to current issues and local problem-solving efforts that have attracted relatively little research or policy interest. Drawing on a long-term interest in local forms of order maintenance, particularly in Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands, as well as an ongoing ARC project (with Miranda Forsyth) into community rule making, Professor Sinclair Dinnen will discuss the significance of this phenomenon for larger processes of state and nation making in contemporary Melanesia.

About the speaker 

Sinclair Dinnen is a Professor at the Department of Pacific Affairs in Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific. 

He has longstanding research interests in regulatory pluralism, comparative criminology, justice and policing, conflict and peacebuilding, post-colonial state formation and development studies.

Read more about the speaker here.