Informal urban settlements are rapidly growing in the greater Honiara region, including peri-urban areas in Guadalcanal Province, with some areas growing at rates as high as 12 per cent per annum SINSO Adding to frustrations, the process has also suffered from a lack of transparency. Responding to growing pressures, the Solomon Islands Government is expanding its urban agenda to address deepseated urban management challenges.
For example, the Commissioner of Lands who had sole responsibility but little accountability for allocating urban land has been replaced by a Land Board of 12 voting members in an effort to depoliticise land allocations.
An informal settlement upgrading strategy, supported by UN-Habitat, is also taking first steps to address the nexus between land, services and governance issues, although progress has been mired by unclear roles and responsibilities from the local level up and concerns about how interventions may affect informal land access and power relations. National framing documents, including a national urban policy and a national housing policy, are also being developed, adding to the paper commitments.
Getting traction will depend heavily on community engagement, political will and resourcing — all currently patchy. We then focus on one key missing element: the critical need to improve housing affordability. For most residents the boundaries between formal and informal parts of the city are irrelevant.
The most rapidly growing informal settlements outside municipal Honiara are on peri-urban customary and registered land in Guadalcanal Province. Numbers are unclear but likely in the hundreds, if not thousands, of households. There is little support for customary landowners wanting to develop their land, and there are few legal protections for those with informal agreements.
