Between New Caledonia and Papua New Guinea

In this concluding chapter, we return to the question posed in the introduction—the question of how to explain the similarities and differences in the relationship between large-scale mines and local-level politics in New Caledonia (NC) and Papua New Guinea (PNG), or in different parts of these two countries. The subtitle of this book (and the title of this chapter) could be read as a sign of our belief that the relationship between large-scale mines and local-level politics is one whose form and content mainly varies between countries or jurisdictions, largely as a result of differences in their political history and the current legal and policy frameworks in which the relationship is embedded. However, while there clearly are some points to be made on this score, the contributions to this volume also show that the relationship varies between projects and places as much as it does between countries, so there is no reason to assign a special kind of power to what we described (in Chapter 1) as the ‘state corner’ in our rectangular model of stakeholder relationships. Instead, we may conceive of the space ‘between’ NC and PNG as one that contains a number of different relationships between large-scale mines and locallevel politics whose variation can partly be understood in terms of the ‘balance of power’ between the four corners in that model, but partly also in terms of other dimensions of difference.