Abstract
In this chapter, Burton stresses the fundamentally political nature of the relationship between ‘remote peoples’, the central government of Papua New Guinea and the large foreign corporations involved in mining enterprises.
His plea for sociocultural research is couched in terms that are disingenuously neutral, but the wider implications of political catastrophes like Bougainville are obvious. He stresses the particularities of different situations: the nature of the traditional political organisation, the impact of mining, the corporate culture and the monitoring capacity of government.
In conclusion, he states that it is wrong to assume that ‘remote peoples’ have no power as they can, in certain situations, easily match the power of both central government and large corporations.
Table of Contents
Ethnography is a controversial activity when applied to development issues, notably the ‘mineral policy process’ in Papua New Guinea. This chapter concerns the kind of development where huge investments are involved—the Papua New Guinea minerals sector has been worth K2.2–2.4 billion in the last few years. The minimal view presented is that investors with hundreds of millions of kina to risk should adopt the precautionary principle of doing the best social impact appraisals they can, and continue to evaluate their own performance in relation to social issues and impact for the length of the mining projects. This is a minimal view: hopefully developers would wish to do considerably more than this and have corporate policies placing culturally appropriate management techniques in a more central position, but it is not necessary to my argument.
Within the mining industry, the kinds of skills and knowledge to handle social issues have been referred to as the ‘new competencies’ of mining, the ‘soft skills that are, in fact, hard skills’ as a landmark speech from the chairman of CRA described them (Davis 1995). At the level of executive corporate policy statements, other major resource companies echo this sentiment, with frequent reference to the concept of ‘world’s best practice in environmental care’.
The importance of sociocultural research is that in this narrow context, using suitably appropriate ethnographic techniques and inventing new ones where necessary can avoid risk for both investors and local communities. A loftier ambition is to head off more serious political crisis, such as occurred in Bougainville and more recently at Ok Tedi. Unfortunately, attainment of the ‘new competencies’ leaves much to be desired.
In September 1989 at a Bougainville crisis workshop held at the University of Papua New Guinea, I commented that little research into the land and social organisational matters that sparked the Bougainville crisis was carried out prior to the opening of the mine, and no studies were done afterwards. Further, sustained fieldwork-intensive studies were not being carried out in any of the new mining areas. I called for a reprioritisation of funding arrangements for applied social research in Papua New Guinea (Burton 1989).
Nothing meaningful eventuated from the workshop, although many prominent Bougainvilleans attended, including the now rebel-aligned Premier Joseph Kabui. It was also ironic that institutional research funds were cut to nothing in the following budget year as part of the government’s austerity measures.
A turning-point for mine impact studies in 1989 was a seminar given at the University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG) by Stuart Kirsch, a doctoral student in anthropology then returning from a long stay among the Yonggom people. Kirsch was able to detail at first hand the issues which were, five years later, to lead a group of Yonggom spokesmen to instigate law-suits in the Supreme Court of Victoria, in Melbourne, seeking reparations of A$4 billion for environmental damage. The seminar and its subsequent publication, notably in the Times of Papua New Guinea under the headline ‘Ok Tedi a sewer’ (Kirsch 1989a; 1989b), was treated by the mine operators and government officials as nuisance academic commentary. Photocopies of Kirsch’s second article, published a little later in Research in Melanesia, circulated among the mining management in Tabubil and Port Moresby during 1990 and 1991, at the same time as the Papua New Guinea government approved the Sixth Supplemental Agreement at Ok Tedi, which allowed, after three years of environmental studies, the permanent discharge of mine wastes into the Ok Tedi and Fly River systems.
In respect of Ok Tedi, a decade earlier, Richard Jackson (and his student Budai Tapari), were seconded to Papua New Guinea’s National Planning Office for six months to do a planning study of the North Fly area, where the mine was then being negotiated. However, after the mine opened Jackson was only able to find a few thousand dollars for follow-up studies, and monitoring of the social environment ceased in 1984. Throughout the 1980s, starved of institutional funds, with intermittent international grants, and with a weak ability to market its expertise, mine monitoring work from the University of Papua New Guinea was limited to the environmental investigations in water bodies off the Fly River more than 250km from the mine site (Pernetta 1988).