Under Ubuntu 16.04, using Gnome 3, I have installed and selected the Paper cursor theme. When the mouse is over the top bar, it respects this theming. When it is over the title bar of a Gnome application, it does not.
Other solutions to this problem suggest running sudo update-alternatives --config x-cursor-theme and selecting the theme to make it consistent across all applications. But this will presumably change the theme for all users, and requires superuser access.
How can a user without superuser access set a cursor theme for only themselves?
Here's an example of the problem. When the mouse is over the top bar, it uses the Paper theme:
When it's over a title bar it does not:
