Long-term leasehold arrangements for customary land in Solomon Islands

Abstract

In the interests of promoting the people's welfare, long-term leasehold tenure of customary land should be carefully made available to individual tenants on commercially viable areas throughout Solomon Islands. This approach is favoured for several reasons: a similar arrangement to individual long-term leasehold of customary land can be found in pre-contact societies; it is allowed under the current legal framework; and the systematic application of the concept of long-term individual leasehold tenure has already worked in Solomon Islands under the Fixed-Term Leasehold and Perpetual Estates legislation, but more significantly on a much broader scale in Fiji under the Native Land Trust Act 1948. This article argues that it is possible to draft a comprehensive legal framework for this purpose without undermining the cultural, political, religious and historical dimensions of customary land.