Mining companies’ corporate social responsibility programs could yield better outcomes if they tackled “real change on the ground,” new research has found.
According to Simon Fraser University’s political economist Anil Hira, miners and companies in other sectors such as forestry and the textile industry should tie themselves to real changes that have broader and lasting impacts in the communities they reach.
In a paper published in the journal Global Affairs, Hira says that this approach is a departure from the current, widespread idea of capital-intensive one-off projects.
EITI data revealed that the mining the industry shows no real improvement for local communities or diminution of conflicts
By analyzing data on how Canadian companies fare in the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), the researcher found that the industry shows no real improvement for local communities or diminution of conflicts, despite a plethora of global CSR efforts.
“If anyone buys a gold ring to get married, they can’t guarantee that gold hasn’t been produced by conflict or child labour in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Hira said in a media statement. “They can’t guarantee that people involved in that gold mining are getting a fair wage, or that their communities are benefiting from the mining project or that the environmental effects won’t last for generations once the mining project ends.”
In his view, these flaws make it difficult for consumers to make ethical product choices.
For the economist, one way to address these issues is by eliminating competing standards, something that companies can do by working with international organizations, NGOs and governments on a harmonized label for consumers. Hira believes this would improve consumer confidence that the products they are buying were produced ethically and sustainably.
Hira also said that organizations can work with local unions and activists to put pressure on local governments to improve conditions for workers.
Comments
Anil Hira
It is unfortunate that I did not have a chance to clarify my commentary in regard to this article. I have a number of concerns about the way that mining csr is conducted in the South. My main one is the lack of standards and transparency around government expenditures. The second one is the lack of effort to change conditions on the ground in verifiable ways, as opposed to reporting how much money was spent. The third and perhaps key one is that there are abundant conflicts of interest in the monitoring and evaluation system, whereby the auditors rely upon future contracts and thus are unlikely as well as being generally unqualified to report on community social and political conditions. With the same expenditures, there could be a sea change in outcomes and reduction in conflict if these 3 problems were addressed.