Keywords

1 Introduction

New Caledonia is just one of six collectivités outside of Europe under the control of France, along with five départements. This collection of overseas territories gives France an expansive global footprint across the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans, as well as the largest exclusive economic zone in the world (Fisher 2013). The political statuses of these collectivités and départements are complicated, with as many different arrangements as there are territories (Mrgudovic 2012). Yet New Caledonia is especially distinctive politically in the French sphere of influence, given its unique status under the French constitution as a special collectivity.

It is also distinctive within the Pacific Islands region, not least due to its consistently high levels of women’s political representation, paralleled only by French Polynesia. The French parity laws, as implemented in New Caledonia, offer unprecedented access to political institutions and positions for women, even within the confines of masculinised customary and formal power structures. Close to half of the seats in New Caledonia’s three Provincial Assemblies and Congress are held by women, and the number of women in politics is also high in the other French Pacific territories of French Polynesia and Wallis and Futuna. Elsewhere in the region, women’s political representation lags behind. As of April 2020, women occupied just 6% of seats in the legislatures of the independent Pacific, and the only three countries in the world with no women in the national parliaments – Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu and the Federated States of Micronesia – were all Pacific neighbours (IPU 2020).

New Caledonia could be described from a political science perspective as a polarised polity. The primary political cleavage is around the issue of independence from France (see Chauchat 2017; Forrest and Kowasch 2016). A referendum on the issue was held in November 2018, resulting in a relatively narrow defeat for the independence option (Chauchat 2019; Maclellan 2019b). In a second referendum in October 2020, the proportion of pro-independence votes increased further, although at 46.74%, it was still short of a majority (Fisher 2020). A third referendum in December 2021 was largely boycotted by pro-independence voters, leaving the question of New Caledonia’s future political status unsettled.

The independence debate in New Caledonia is largely – albeit simplistically – conceptualised along ethnic lines, with the Indigenous Kanak population the strongest supporters of independence, while the settler populations, and in particular those of European descent, more likely to support remaining with France. Yet within these two broad pro- and anti-independence camps, there is significant diversity of perspectives, informed by different experiences of colonisation, ethnicity, class and other identities and individualities. These differences can perhaps be seen in the intense fragmentation of New Caledonian politics beyond simple pro- and anti-independence groupings (see Maclellan 2005, 2015).

In this complex political environment, the parity laws have meant more than a simple numerical increase in women’s political representation. They have ensured a diversity of women’s views and perspectives are represented within political institutions. That is not to say they have been a panacea; politics in New Caledonia, especially at its highest echelons, remains male-dominated. Yet in the context of the Pacific Islands region, with the lowest levels of women’s representation in the world, the implementation of the parity laws has had a profound effect on politics.

This chapter will explore women’s involvement in New Caledonian politics both before and after the introduction of the parity laws. The following section examines the history of women’s political organising in New Caledonia. Then, women’s representation in formal politics, including the introduction of the parity law, is discussed. The final section will look at the complexity of gender as a category of analysis in New Caledonia, using the lens of intersectionality (see Crenshaw 1991).

2 Feminisms, Anti-feminisms and Women’s Organising in New Caledonia

Feminism as a movement has never been wholly embraced by women activists in New Caledonia. Alan Berman (2005) argues: “The feminist movement in New Caledonia is, for the most part, non-existent”. This is largely because, for Kanak activists, feminism is seen as linked to Global North agendas and potentially detracting from the wider goals of the nationalist movement. In the Pacific Islands, feminism is often perceived as a western construct and not especially relevant to the Pacific context (George 2010). Where feminism is articulated in the region, it is often linked to maternal narratives and imagery, while western feminism is seen as individualistic or even anti-family (George 2010; Leckie 2002). Pacific feminism is also closely linked to Christian values (Jolly 2000), understandable in a region where the overwhelming majority of the population identifies as Christian and where Christian-based women’s organisations are viewed as much more acceptable to the wider community than secular groups (Monson 2013). Yet for the most part, feminism is seen as an unhelpful framing, too far removed from Pacific realities and values to be of use to Pacific women activists and the women’s movement more broadly.

This is not to say that there are no localised articulations of a feminist agenda. In Berman’s work, he noted that while numerous high-profile Kanak women leaders he interviewed rejected the label feminist, some were more open to it. This latter group included prominent pro-independence activist and former Vice-President of New Caledonia Déwé Gorodey who stated in an interview: “I think it’s through ignorance that the term ‘feminist’ is not adopted here” (quoted in Berman 2005). An Indigenous feminist movement does exist in New Caledonia. One of the founding groups of the Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste (FLNKS), historically the dominant political faction on the pro-independence side, was the Group of Kanak and Exploited Women in Struggle (GFKEL). Led by Sussana Ounei, the GFKEL was explicitly a radical feminist organisation that was set up in response to the failure of PALIKA, one of the largest groups within the FLNKS, to establish a women’s section (Salomon and Hamelin 2008). While the group became defunct in the late 1980s, its existence proves the presence of a feminist agenda in the nationalist movement (Baker 2019; Chappell 2013). The radical, yet short-lived, overtly feminist dimension of the nationalist movement was succeeded by well-subscribed and politically active women’s associations throughout the country (Salomon and Hamelin 2008).

Younger women, many of whom had been educated abroad, were critical in the establishment of politically active religious and secular women’s groups in the 1960s and 1970s. These educated young women often held leadership positions in the newly formed groups (Paini 2003). These groups were an important space for activism, but they were clearly modelled on Western social and religious structures (Beboko-Beccalossi 2017). Thus, influences from overseas were keenly felt in women’s activist spaces in New Caledonia, as in men’s and mixed groups (see Chappell 2013).

Historically in the Pacific Islands region, much of women’s organisation occurred through religious channels and networks (see Douglas 2003). This was also true of New Caledonia: “Religion undoubtedly provided a stimulus for the formation of [women’s] groups and collective moments” (Beboko-Beccalossi 2017, p. 183). Religion in New Caledonia as elsewhere in the Pacific has been thoroughly indigenised (Paini 2017). Christianity, along with culture, is critical to self-identity for many Kanak people; religion and custom are interrelated and act to reinforce even as they transform one another (Eriksen 2008; Keesing 1989).

Church women’s groups take on significant importance in communities and are often highly respected. While they may have apparently conservative agendas (Jolly 1991), Christian women’s groups across various denominations have nevertheless important forces for development activity, social activism and collective mobilisation, especially in rural areas (Pollard 2003; Scheyvens 2003). Church-based women’s groups provide space for women to organise collective action and to build leadership skills and experience. This element of church women’s organisations is not unique to the Pacific region; in Europe and the United States, Christian women’s associations were commonly at the forefront of early women’s rights activism (see Douglas 2003; McCammon and Campbell 2002). Collectivism and social organisation, often most effective when conducted through church women’s groups, are important strategies where women are excluded from most positions and spheres of political power.

Women also became increasingly visible in government agencies from the 1980s (Beboko-Beccalossi 2017). This institutionalised the women’s movement to an extent. In academic scholarship, institutionalisation is traditionally treated as the death knell for a social movement, but Merrindahl Andrew (2019) argues this is too simplistic. In New Caledonia, the correlation between increased women’s representation and strengthened women’s policy machinery (discussed below) shows the dynamism of interactions between the women’s movement and the state.

As demonstrated, even if feminism remains a highly contested concept in New Caledonia, there is evidence of widespread effective women’s organisation inside and outside government structures. The women’s movement insofar as it exists in New Caledonia, however, is still affected by underlying political currents and divisions. One early example of this polarity was the creation of the Conseil des Femmes de Nouvelle Calédonie (CFNC) in 1983. Initially established as an umbrella organisation for women’s associations in New Caledonia, open to groups with memberships of all ethnicity, rising ethnic tensions soon affected its work:

Soon after the country was deep in rivalries and resentments, different ethnic groups regarded each other with suspicion, and the two main political alliances fought like bitter enemies. Such a climate of tension inflamed people’s minds, and eventually it infiltrated within the women’s council. Many among the association leaders ceased taking part in the meetings, and those who did attend brought with them proposals that were biased by their political sympathies (Beboko-Beccalossi 2017, p. 187).

In 1989, the CFNC became the Council of Melanesian Women of New Caledonia and later the Federation of Melanesian Women’s Associations of New Caledonia (Beboko-Beccalossi 2017). The experience of the CFNC shows the challenges in establishing a cross-partisan women’s movement across the pro- and anti-independence divide.

3 Women in New Caledonian Politics

The under-representation of women in New Caledonian politics until the turn of the twenty-first century was profound. This was particularly acute for Kanak women, described by Berman (2005) as “token participants historically in the political affairs of New Caledonia”. From the establishment of the Territorial Assembly of New Caledonia in the 1950s until 1999, there were no female members (Berman 2005; Drage 1995). In 1999, the first post-Nouméa Accord elections were held, although the parity laws were not yet implemented. In that election, nine women were elected. This number included four Kanak women. While women’s representation at the municipal level was slightly higher than at territorial level, it was still extremely low. In 1998, out of 700 councillors, only around 20 were Kanak women (Berman 2005).

In 1999, a series of constitutional amendments were passed in France, colloquially known as the parity laws. These laws ostensibly mandated gender parity in political representation. Since the passage of the parity laws, women’s representation in the French National Assembly and Senate has increased; as of April 2020, two out of every five delegates to the National Assembly and a third of the Senate are women (IPU 2020). Full parity has yet to be achieved, however, and this is largely due to a lack of political will on the part of political parties, many of which elect to pay financial penalties rather than appoint equal numbers of women and men as candidates (see Murray 2007). While the laws were passed in France, it was expected that they would apply in all overseas territories. Furthermore, in the French Pacific territories of New Caledonia, French Polynesia and Wallis and Futuna, parity would be more strictly enforced than in mainland France because of the electoral system used, list proportional representation. In this system, according to parity, lists must be made up of equal numbers of women and men in alternating order; if parity on the list was not achieved, instead of financial penalties, the party would simply not be registered to contest elections. In each of the French Pacific territories, there were attempts to delay or block the implementation of the parity laws (see Baker 2019).

In New Caledonia, Simon Loueckhote, at the time a member of the French Senate for New Caledonia as well as the Speaker of the New Caledonian Congress, proposed an amendment to delay implementation of the parity laws in the territory until 2007. Arguments against the parity laws in New Caledonia coalesced around three key themes: that women, and especially Kanak women, were not prepared to enter politics; that the laws would detrimentally affect Kanak culture and custom; and that the laws were colonially imposed and should be opposed on those grounds (Berman 2005). As evident by the arguments used, male political leaders attempted to situate the parity laws within wider debates on independence and on the protection of Kanak culture, traditions and ways of life, in order to delegitimise them.

The parity laws were presented as a colonial imposition and as a distraction for the pro-independence movement. When the Loueckhote amendment was put forward, a spokesman for the pro-independence group Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste (FLNKS) criticised parity as a threat to the independence movement:

The political arm of the FLNKS … regrets that during this heated debate, certain politicians have hoped that the law on parity would apply “ipso facto” in our country, thus calling into questions the will for decolonisation and self-government sanctioned by the Nouméa Accord (quoted in Claudel 2000, p. 2).

Nicole Waïa, a Kanak woman leader who was a member of the Congress at the time, questioned the idea that the parity laws were a threat to the decolonisation process: “How does the fight for parity between men and women harm the process of decolonisation? For me, decolonisation should result in advancement, change, progress” (Les Nouvelles Calédoniennes 2000, p. 8). Other supporters of parity countered that this law was no different to other French laws imposed on New Caledonia in the post-colonial era (Berman 2005). These include laws relating to gender that are far more liberal than those of New Caledonia’s independent Pacific neighbours, notably regarding access to abortion, as well as same-sex marriage and adoption.

Opponents of the parity law also portrayed the move as a threat to traditional gender roles and, by extension, to Kanak values and culture. Members of the Customary Senate, an advisory body made up of Kanak elders, voiced fears that the parity laws would cause societal problems for the Kanak population (Berman 2005). César Qenegei, a Kanak public figure, argued that parity would disrupt the Melanesian way of life (Fléaux 2000). This attempt to frame parity as antithetical to custom was resisted by many prominent Kanak women (Baker 2019).

The Loueckhote amendment was publicly condemned by women, as well as some men, from both sides of politics. Protests were held in the capital of Nouméa and other towns, and a petition to the French Minister of the Interior in support of the implementation of the parity laws gathered 1600 signatures. The strength of the pro-parity movement in New Caledonia was notable, but equally so were the sources of support for parity. The parity laws debate was a unifier of women in New Caledonia (Berman 2005). A genuine cross-partisan political movement emerged to oppose the Loueckhote amendment and ensure the parity laws were applied in the territory. This in itself was notable, given the historic difficult in creating a united women’s movement in New Caledonia, as seen by the CFNC experience (Beboko-Beccalossi 2017). Ultimately, the Loueckhote amendment was withdrawn, and parity was first implemented in the 2004 territorial elections.

The immediate effect of the introduction of parity was the numerical increase in women’s representation. In the 2004 election, the number of women in politics in New Caledonia increased substantially. Women won 47% of the seats in the Congress and up to 50% of the seats in each of the three provincial assemblies (Chappell 2005; Maclellan 2005). Furthermore, Marie-Noëlle Thémereau – leader of the Avenir Ensemble party and an outspoken proponent of parity – was elected as the first female President of New Caledonia. Thémereau, formerly a member of the right-wing and firmly anti-independence Rassemblement pour une Calédonie dans la République (RPCR), had joined the more centre-right and “reconciliatory” party (Chanter 2006, p. 150) in 2001. During her tenure as leader, Avenir Ensemble became the RPCR’s main contender for dominance in the loyalist political sphere. Gorodey, who had been Vice-President since 2001, was re-appointed in her post.

The initial gains of parity in terms of women’s representation in the legislatures have been maintained. In the 2019 elections, women won 25 out of 54 seats in the Congress (46%), seven out of 14 seats in the Loyalty Islands Provincial Assembly (50%), ten out of 22 seats in the Northern Provincial Assembly (45%) and 19 out of 40 seats in the Southern Provincial Assembly (47.5%). Women were under-represented at the heads of party lists in the 2019 elections; of the lists that won at least one seat, women headed one of four in the Loyalty Islands, zero of three in North Province and one of four in South Province (République Française 2019). This accounts for the slight over-representation of men in the Congress as well as in the Northern and Southern Provincial Assemblies, while the two female-headed lists returned even numbers of elected members – and thus even numbers of male and female representatives – four of the male-headed lists returned odd numbers.

The parity laws have indeed resulted in near-parity in political representation in New Caledonia. In terms of women’s political leadership, however, progress in the post-parity era has been less impressive. In 2019, one of the female-headed lists, the hardline anti-independence grouping Avenir en confiance, whose list was headed by Sonia Backès of Les Républicains calédoniens, won the most seats, winning half the seats in the Southern Provincial Assembly and 18 seats in the Congress. After negotiations in the power-sharing government were concluded, however, Thierry Santa, head of the Rassemblement-Les Républicains party and another key figure in the Avenir en confiance coalition, was elected president. The vice-president was Gilbert Tyuienon of the pro-independence UC-FLNKS – both are men. Only two of the 11 members (18%) of the government are women.

While there have been two female presidents of New Caledonia since the parity laws were introduced – Thémereau and Cynthia Ligeard – neither served a full term. The Thémereau administration had a rocky start, with members of her former party resigning from government just hours after she was confirmed in the position, thus bringing down the government. Both Thémereau and Gorodey were eventually reinstated in their positions, but Berman (2005) cites this incident as evidence that the political climate for women in high-level political positions remained “very chilly” even after parity was introduced. Thémereau resigned as President in 2007 and was replaced by another Avenir Ensemble politician, Harold Martin. Ligeard won the presidency following the 2014 election, but her administration lasted less than 6 months. The political turmoil faced by both Thémereau and Ligeard stemmed from disputes among the anti-independence parties.

Despite this mixed report card on the political advances won by parity, there has been noticeable progress in terms of the substantive representation of women and women’s interests. Studies have found that issues of women’s rights were paid more attention in political debate in New Caledonia after parity was introduced (Bargel et al. 2010; George 2013, 2015). This turn has had substantive impacts, notably in the provision of more funding for women’s policy machinery since the introduction of the parity laws and in new measures to support women’s educational opportunities and economic empowerment.

One noticeable shift has been in renewed attention from the government to the issue of violence against women. This is a major issue in New Caledonia, as elsewhere in the world; a 2017 study reported that one in five women in the territory had experienced spousal violence in the past year (Rivière and Ronai 2017). Political actors including Déwé Gorodey have been instrumental in driving the government’s agenda on this issue. Recent progress in this area has included additional government funding for civil society organisations working to combat violence against women, the creation of an emergency telephone line for victims of sexual and domestic violence and the provision of emergency accommodation (Gouvernement de la Nouvelle-Calédonie 2019).

Parity was an exogenous process in New Caledonia – imposed externally from the French “métropole”, in a debate that paid limited attention to how it may be perceived and implemented in overseas territorial contexts (see Baker 2014). Nevertheless, women in New Caledonia took control of the parity laws debate in the territory, firstly to defeat the Loueckhote amendment and ensure the laws were introduced and secondly to utilise a newfound strength in numbers to promote women’s issues on the policy agenda. The women’s movement that arose in support of the parity movement in New Caledonia is perhaps especially notable in the context of the complicated ethnic and nationalist politics of the territory, as discussed more below.

4 Intersecting Identities

Gender as a political identity cannot be considered in a vacuum. In the Pacific Islands, as in all other regions of the world, “historical, cultural and special specificities complicate an understanding of women’s agencies and alert us to the dilemma of treating the category ‘women’ either as unified or as infinitely fragmented” (Leckie 2002, p. 175). While issues such as women’s underrepresentation in politics, maternal health and violence against women cut across distinctions of ethnicity, culture and class, they do not affect all groups equally. Intersectionality is an analytical tool that highlights how the marginalisation of groups and individuals can be compounded through overlapping forms and types of discrimination based on gender, ethnicity, class, sexuality and other social identities (see Crenshaw 1991; Smooth 2011).

The politics of intersecting identities can be especially fraught in the contexts of nationalist movements, as in New Caledonia. Resistance movements with male-dominated leadership hierarchies can treat women’s issues an unimportant or even as a distraction to the cause (Horowitz 2017). The specific struggles of women are subsumed within a wider movement, and explicit attention to them is seen as divisive, with political movements in this way echoing the gender blindness of state structures they are fighting against: “indigenous women fall between the edifice of rights constructed by … states and political movements” (Radcliffe 2002, p. 149).

While nationalist movements may be inconsiderate of gender issues, the broader feminist movement is seen as uninterested in issues of nationalism and Indigenous rights. Writing of her experiences in the Hawaiian nationalist movement, Haunani-Kay Trask (1996) positions Western feminism as diametrically opposed to Indigenous rights: “More than a feminist, I am a nationalist”. This is reflected in the New Caledonian context in a quote from Marie-Paul Tourte (in Berman 2005):

I think feminist is understood to mean fight against men. Kanak women want a balance. They think the struggle for independence, for Kanaky, necessitates unity among the Kanak people; division must be avoided … Because we’re in a colonial situation, I think that Kanak women subordinate their own internal problems to the struggle against colonialism.

In his writing, Jean-Marie Tjibaou (2005) – the celebrated Kanak pro-independence leader who was assassinated in 1989 – emphasised the role Kanak women had to play in the nationalist movement. He articulates the role of women as mothers and custodians of culture:

It is they who give the single co-extensive gift of life and blood, the one through the other. The father gives name, rank and social status, but the child, boy or girl, will always remember the cord which ties him to the mother’s clan … the women of Caledonia, like all the mothers of the world, give life at birth and again every moment of the daily round (Tjibaou 2005, p. 28)

He notes the key role played by women’s associations in standing against alcoholism, violence against women and other societal ills and in promoting Kanak culture. He credits these associations with the original idea to hold a festival of Melanesian art, which became Melanesia 2000 (Tjibaou 2005). The festival, the first of its kind in New Caledonia, was held in Nouméa in September 1975 under the direction of a committee led by Tjibaou and was a turning point in the revitalisation of Kanak cultural identity and the creation of a unified Kanak political voice. Women were active in the conceptualisation and organisation of the festival, as well as performing (see Graille 2016).

As detailed above, women asserted themselves within the Kanak nationalist movement both in collaboration with men and in separate affiliated organisations, including the GFKEL. In many ways, the nationalist movement was an opportunity for women to engage more fully in the political space. Yet many female nationalist activists articulated a perceived tension between fighting for the nationalist cause and promoting a women’s rights agenda (see Berman 2005). On the anti-independence side, too, politically active women need to position themselves in relation to their social identities, not just gender, but other cross-cutting identities such as class that complicate an already fragmented political system (Chanter 2006) and make issues of representation more fraught. In the 2014 territorial election, women headed the three most conservative of six lists registered in the South Province; in 2019 again, the most conservative list was headed by a woman (Maclellan 2015, 2019a). These tensions reflect the complexities of navigating intersectional identities for political women.

5 Conclusion

Women’s political representation is often highlighted as an issue, yet the claim that half of the world’s population has any kind of collective basis for mobilisation and representation has commonly been resisted, by both men and women. Nonetheless, there are strong cases to be made for the need for women to be represented and to represent women’s issues in political institutions. Young (2002) claims that women share a social status as a result of structural inequalities, and this shared status informs their contribution to politics. Phillips (1995, 1998) makes the case that women have shared interests that are formed from the lived experience of being a woman and that women are uniquely qualified to represent these interests in politics. It can certainly be argued, as by Carol Kidu, one of the few women to be elected to the Papua New Guinea Parliament, that “when there is only less than 1% of half the population in Parliament, it is not a representative democracy” (quoted in Garrett 2013).

Gender is, of course, not the only or even the most important identity that shapes political consciousness and action. As I have shown in other research related to women voters in the Pacific Islands (Baker 2018), men are afforded a complex calculation taking into account their various identities and allegiances, while women are often expected to vote on, and are heavily criticised for not voting on, gendered lines. In New Caledonia, there is a diversity of perspectives among women (and men) informed by different experiences of colonisation, ethnicity, class, the exacerbating divisions with the pro- and anti-independence movements and a myriad other identities and factors.

Despite this diversity and despite the deep political cleavage of independence that still defines New Caledonian politics, common ground was found by women in the debate around the implementation of the parity laws in the territory. This political alliance of women from across the political divide was arguably short-lived (Baker 2019). Nevertheless, it demonstrated commonalities in women’s experiences of being excluded from formal politics, and the existence of a shared women’s political agenda, at least in terms of descriptive representation. Women are now present in New Caledonia’s formal political institutions in remarkable numbers, both in terms of historical representation in the territory and from a global perspective; if New Caledonia were to be included on the Inter-Parliamentary Union’s list of women’s representation, which only includes independent countries, it would place among the highest-performing countries in the world (IPU 2020).

Men still dominate key positions of political power in New Caledonia. Yet the parity laws have provided space for women’s interests to be represented, articulated and (equally importantly) funded through policy machinery and initiatives on violence against women and women’s economic empowerment, among other issues. Women’s increased access to political positions has enhanced their status in communities and empowered them to challenge their lack of access to other institutions – notably, through a campaign instigated by female politicians and Kanak women’s groups to open membership of the Customary Senate to women (Naisseline 2005; Salomon and Hamelin 2008).

In the Pacific Islands region, women are mostly under-represented as representatives in legislatures. Where they are the sole female representative, they are tasked with representing all women as a group; where there is a small cohort, they are often criticised for not working together (Baker 2018; George 2015). As the number of female representatives increases, the expectations associated with the role become easier to manage (Baker 2018; Corbett and Liki 2015). This, among other reasons, is why numerical increases in women’s representation are important; women are better served when there is a range of backgrounds, perspectives and lived experiences represented in political institutions. What the parity laws have accomplished in New Caledonia is to create unprecedented space for such a diversity of views to be represented.