“Who here is a volunteer?” Peacebuilding, brokerage, and moral authority in Papua New Guinea

Abstract This paper is a critical examination of the global peacebuilding industry as it has operated in Papua New Guinea (PNG) and is based around the author's experience as a volunteer broker to the United States Agency for International Development Papua New Guinea Peace Project. The peacebuilding interventions of global organisations are so laden with bureaucratic burden, donor expectation and risk aversion that they are destined for failure on both structural and moral grounds. Taking a grassroots peacebuilding initiative in PNG's Hela Province as an example, the paper contrasts what can be achieved when local peacebuilding activists and organisations are genuinely empowered to direct and design programs from the ground up with the top‐down, corporatised. and remotely controlled methods of the global peacebuilding industry. Grassroots peacebuilders who act as brokers to this industry are mined for information as peacebuilding consultants need to extract material to service their own need to enable and analysis and produce reports. It is not the individual consultants or agency representatives who are to blame, rather the structural conditions of the industry itself that is the source of its own moral failings.