Policy transfer and reversal: Customary land registration from Africa to Melanesia

Ideas and laws about land titling were transferred from East Africa to Melanesia in the 1950s and 1960s. There they provoked a nationalist reaction, and new sources of ideas became influential: from other South Pacific countries in the 1970s, from econationalist theory in the 1980s, and from the World Bank in the 1990s. Research has cast doubt on the effectiveness of earlier schemes, though little has emerged in Melanesia to take their place. This article analyses the process as one of failed 'policy transfer' in which the beneficiaries of the policy may see it quite differently from the government and donors who promote it.