Solomon Islands has often been seen as exemplifying wider concerns regarding customary land tenure, economic development and political instability in the southwest Pacific. Locals express concern regarding inequality in land control at multiple scales, while aid donors urge people to register land as a means to increase legal certainty, build peace and render land more ’marketable’. This chapter situates debates about land in Solomon Islands within wider global debates regarding customary tenure, gender inequality and state regulation. It highlights a long-standing divide in feminist debates, between those who perceive land tenure in terms of a hierarchically ordered and gendered ‘bundle of rights’, and those who perceive land as subject to fluid, negotiable claims. Drawing insights from legal geography, political ecology and feminist scholarship on legal pluralism, it suggests that a focus on the ways in which ‘access’ to resources is transformed into state-sanctioned ‘property’ recognises that property is negotiable while also highlighting factors that contribute to inequality. This approach also directs attention to the role of scholars in the formation of property.

Solomon Islanders often refer to the idea that women may not, cannot and do not speak about land matters, and it is clear that the recursive constitution of property and authority not only sediments land control, but state norms and institutions, as (hyper)masculine domains. Yet it is equally clear that women do ‘speak’, and this chapter focuses on collaborative efforts to disrupt dominant understandings of property, territory and political authority and assert more expansive practices. This chapter argues that first, an analytical emphasis on state-sanctioned property reinforces the dominant portrayal of gender relations in the region, according to which women are silenced and victims of their culture and religion, and reproduces material inequalities. Second, the political strategies actually used by women, which appear to resonate elsewhere in the region, suggest that custom and Christianity provide greater scope to contest the terms of property, territory and authority than is generally recognised. This has important implications for understanding the ways in which property might be challenged and re-formed.