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Whose Economy?

UWS and Oxfam Seminar Series

Lessons from the Outback?How Community Complexity Shaped Indigenous Australians’

Relationships with Miners

Inverness

Katherine TrebeckOxfam’s UK Poverty Programme

March 25, 2011

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Lessons from the Outback...?

Background Participation, negotiation, deliberation,

collective agreements => community ownership?

Communities themselves are not cohesive, they seldom engage as one single voice, nor advocate an uncontested position

There are risks and caveats

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Community who?

A community can be defined without geographical borders– as a body of people, with some degree of shared history, values or objectives

Communities of fate a more useful concept?

The plural (communities) reminds us of complexities and heterogeneity

Stakeholders as a company’s ‘community’

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The story Three mines Many communities Many demands Many tactics Many outcomes (civil

regulation) Whose success?

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Is the concept of ‘community’ of any use?

Communities must deploy significant time and resources in order to bring leverage to bear over miners

Each instance of confrontation highlighted considerable sacrifice in order to organise and attend protests of various kinds

In terms of civil regulation it is invariably only those passionate enough; with time (or choosing action in one realm at the expense of participation in another)= Burnout (exhaustion, resignation and eventually withdrawal)Toby Gangele: “I’ve given up. It’s been six years now. I’m not fighting anymore”

Formal engagement processes are also time and resource intensive (agreement negotiations, meetings, and reviews all make great demands on those involved)

Only a small proportion of people will be able to directly and actively involve themselves (ie those holding strong – although not necessarily widely held – positions)

This can lead to de facto representation (those speaking the loudest, displaying most charisma or simply those who are able to dominate others, those who conform to norms of discourse and eloquence)- at the expense of those with little persuasive force or status?

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Community for whom?

Little substantial political equality between a company’s stakeholders

And between different elements within communities themselves= factions, divisions, tension, winners, losers

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Are all represented?

Feeling amongst some local Indigenous community members that they had not been sufficiently included in an agreement with the mining companyEg ‘the forgotten Waanyi’= seeking alternative means – the sit-in – to achieve their demands

Considerable effort to understand the contours between representative organisations and their constituents, and the complex inter-community dynamics- Eg Rio Tinto’s engagement with anthropologists, sociologists and other ‘community experts’ in this process

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Substitution risk

Government substituting royalty or other benefits derived from mining in the place of government provision results in a reduction of state finance for community services

Communities may not gain any net financial benefit if mining monies are used to finance services that government would have provided anyway

Perceptions that existing (or threatened) lack of government delivery mean that some Indigenous communities might acquiesce to mining if they view mining as the only means to obtain necessary outcomes – health and education services or employment, for example

In some, already disadvantaged, localities Indigenous communities are therefore understandably increasingly looking to mining companies to deliver needed infrastructure and services

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Who left to regulate whom?

As partnerships between community organisations and business proliferate, boundaries become blurred with corporate provision of certain services demanded by communities

But, which sector of society will have sufficient independence to restrain potential abuse of this broadening corporate role?

Growing expectations that companies will respond to the social demands of certain communities creates a potentially dangerous situation where corporations, through their CSR programs, assume some citizenship obligations traditionally accorded to the state, while remaining beyond formal democratic process

When governments support corporate development (as they did in all the case studies), the task falls again to communities to monitor and hold companies accountable

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Whose win-win?

The principal benefit companies could offer – employment and training – was irrelevant to many local Indigenous people who were either uninterested or unable (due to health or safety requirements, for example) to take up employment and training opportunities

Therefore many were excluded from the initiatives offered by companies

Conflation by industry of their interests and those of Indigenous communities – implied in the assumption that ‘mutual benefit’ is possible – means that Indigenous people are restricted to those benefits offered and deemed appropriate by companies

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Lessons....? Are we really talking about

stakeholders? Are the risks worth it and how

can they be managed and minimised?

How might communities position themselves?

How can power imbalances be addressed?

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To view all the papers in the Whose Economy series click here

To view all the videos and presentations

from the seminars click here