In my last article, Seeing the Whole Picture: How Young People in PNG Navigate Power and Systems to Drive Change I reflected on how young people are intuitively applying a Power and Systems lens in their leadership. Their work revealed how deeply relational and contextual power is in our setting, exercised not only through institutions but through relationships, norms, and shared moral worlds.

This reflection continues that discussion, moving from practice to philosophy: from how we see systems to how we understand power itself.

Why we must rethink power

For those of us in the Pacific, conversations about power cannot be separated from colonial legacies. Development practice has long been shaped by frameworks and definitions that come from elsewhere. To understand change in our context, we must rethink power in ways that reflect both the realities of our systems and the lived experiences of our people.

In development, we often describe power in terms of governments, leaders, and institutions. But power is far more complex.

Power lives in relationships, norms, and ideas — in how our societies function and how we imagine change.

Western frames of power

In global development debates, power has often been explained through frameworks like John Gaventa’s “power cube”. Gaventa (2006) identifies three dimensions:

• Visible power – decision-making in parliaments, courts, and policies.
• Hidden power – who sets the agenda and whose issues are excluded.
• Invisible power – the norms and assumptions that shape what people see as possible.

This is useful, but it can overlook the cultural and relational foundations of power in Melanesian societies.

Melanesian realities of power

In PNG, power is relational and hybrid. It flows through:

• Kastom – elders, clans, obligations, and cultural norms.
• Church – moral authority and spiritual legitimacy.
• Wantok system – kinship ties, reciprocity, and social accountability.
• Big-man politics – transactional leadership, status, and resource sharing.

As Yash Ghai and Ron May note, PNG’s political order is defined by hybridity, where customary, religious, and state institutions coexist and compete.

Sociologist Joseph Ketan captures this tension perfectly:

“Papua New Guineans may speak fluent English, wrap themselves in western garments, drive cars and conduct themselves like other modern-world denizens, but they are essentially tribal creatures. They inhabit two publics or moral worlds.” (2016a: 50)

Power in PNG, then, is negotiated between two moral worlds, each shaping legitimacy in different ways.

Decolonising how we see power

Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Decolonising Methodologies, 1999) reminds us that Western frameworks often claim universality while sidelining Indigenous knowledge systems. Decolonising power means:

• Recognising Indigenous epistemologies as valid ways of understanding change.
• Re-centring relational accountability, respect, reciprocity, and obligation as sources of legitimacy.
• Questioning the assumption that power is only about domination, as Kabini Sanga and Martyn Reynolds show in their work on Tok Stori, power can also be about care, consensus, and collective responsibility.

The writings of Bernard Narokobi are especially relevant here. In The Melanesian Way (1983), Narokobi described an ethic grounded in relationships, spirituality, and mutual respect. For him, morality and power are inseparable; authority is legitimate only when it upholds communal wellbeing.

In the Melanesian worldview, leadership is custodianship, not control. Power flows from the ability to maintain harmony within the web of relationships that define community.

To decolonise how we see power, we must reclaim these moral and relational foundations, where influence derives not from status, but from service; not from command, but from care.

Why this matters for development

Ignoring these dimensions of power risks misunderstanding how change happens in PNG and across Melanesia.

• Reforms may fail not because of poor design, but because they overlook the legitimacy of elders or church leaders.
• Youth initiatives may thrive because they are rooted in Wantok trust and reciprocity.
• What outsiders label as “weak participation” may, in reality, reflect culturally specific ways of building consensus.

As Duncan Green writes in How Change Happens (2016), effective power analysis must be situated in context. Decolonising power frames ensures that context is not treated as background detail but as the living fabric of how power is created, shared, and contested.

Closing reflection

Power is never neutral. The ways we define and analyse it reflect particular histories and worldviews.

For PNG and the wider Pacific, decolonising our understanding of power means valuing our own ways of knowing, recognising that authority, legitimacy, and change emerge through relationships as much as through structures.

References:

• Ghai, Y. & May, R. J. (2003). State and Society in Papua New Guinea: The First Twenty-Five Years. ANU E Press.
• Green, D. (2016). How Change Happens. Oxford University Press.
• Ketan, J. (2016a) ‘Good Governance is crucial to building the nation state’, in PNG as a Nation State, Port Moresby: Institute of National Affairs
• Ketan, J. (2016b) ‘Merging traditional Melanesian and modern Western forms of governance in Papua New Guinea’, in PNG at 40 Symposium. Learning from the Past and Engaging with the Future, Port Moresby: Institute of National Affairs
• Narokobi, B. (1983). The Melanesian Way. Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies.
• Sanga, K. & Reynolds, M. (2017, 2018, 2020). Tok Stori as Indigenous Research Methodology. [Multiple works].
• Smith, L. T. (1999 / 2012). Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Zed Books.
• Wilson, S. (2008). Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. Fernwood Publishing.