How you build a social license for a mine
Getting a community to support the development of a mine depends upon good communication, says Dr. Andy Robertson, president of Robertson GeoConsultants.
“To manage a relationship you need to understand a community,” says Robertson. MINING.com interview Andy Robertson in the spring.
“You need to have an exchange of information—a provision of information to the community. The community understands clearly what is and what will be happening and therefore has an appreciation of the impacts that will be happening to their community.
“At the same time they are stakeholders in the mine.They have a involvement that goes beyond the financial involvement or even the jobs involvement, and that leads to a requirement to have input to what happens on the site, how it impacts their community, and what can be done in their community in order to maximize the benefits of mining to insure that there is a net benefit resulting in them granting the social license for the mining to continue.”
Register for Mining and Communities Solutions 2016, June 2016 in Vancouver
Transcript has been shortened and edited for clarity.
MINING.com: Who are you?
Andy Robertson: I am Andy Robertson. I am the president of Robertson GeoConsultants. We are a firm that provides services to large mine development projects particularly those aspects of mining that have impact on community and therefore there is a great interest in the relationships between mines and the communities they effect.
MINING.com: Why is it important for miners to consider the communities around a mine?
Andy Robertson: Mines have both positive and negative benefits or effects on the communities that they have impact on. Communities obviously have the opportunity from benefiting from local infrastructure development, jobs, training and greater commercial interest and investment in the community. This is balanced against the impact from dust, noise, traffic and a larger worker community. All these issues need to be addressed to insure that the net benefit in the community is positive and distributed throughout the community and not just gained by a few.
MINING.com: How do you successfully manage that relationship?
Andy Robertson: To manage a relationship you need to understand a community. You need to have an exchange of information—a provision of information to the community. The community understands clearly what is and what will be happening and therefore has an appreciation of the impacts that will be happening to their community. At the same time they are stakeholders in the mine. They have a involvement that goes beyond the financial involvement or even the jobs involvement, and that leads to a requirement to have input to what happens on the site, how it impacts their community, and what can be done in their community in order to maximize the benefits of mining to insure that there is a net benefit resulting in them granting the social license for the mining to continue.
MINING.com: What are some examples of miners getting community relationships right?
Andy Robertson: A great example are the two diamond mines sitting in the northwest territories. We have Ekati and we have Diavik that have worked extremely hard in integrating the local communities, even while operating fairly distant communities with fly-in fly-out operations. The impacts of the mines is relatively low on the individual communities themselves but the net benefits of more opportunity and training has resulted in a very measurable and definite benefit in those areas. There are other areas such as Bingham Canyon just outside of Salt Lake City where continuous interaction with the community creates continuous improvement that maintains social license.
MINING.com: What is Mining and Communities Solutions 2016?
Andy Robertson: The conference is intended to bring together the practitioners of the systems and the processes that allow the mining companies and the mining projects to address it in an appropriate level- the interactions between the communities and the mines. Also, it is an opportunity for the community leaders, the NGOs, the regulators, the academics that are interested in the mining and community relationships in order to come forward and share their views and opinions on how to do this best. If you are developing a project this is the place in order to be able to exchange ideas and gain information from others who have done it before.
Image of sitting miners by Vyacheslav Svetlichnyy / Shutterstock.com