At Porgera, in the Papua New Guinea highlands, an unprecedented level of economic benefits has flowed to the community: housing for over 500 families, about K60 million in business contracts, about K30 million in compensation for land clearance, and sundry other benefits, including mine employment for about eight hundred (Banks 1997). At the same time staff deployed in community relations functions has grown to about 85 people across the Enga Province, a far greater number than had ever been used in any other resource project in the country (Bonnell 1994:112).

The Porgerans invented what is termed the ‘Development Forum’: a series of round-table meetings in which the would-be developers, in this case Placer, and the various levels of government respond to a position paper presented by landowner representatives. The invention of the Forum reflects a substantially greater level of activism on the part of Porgera leaders; unlike the Faiwol, Awin and Yonggom, their society supplies a political style of leadership.

The other side of the story is the question of who has received this substantial income and what problems of distribution, so notorious in contributing to the cause of the Bougainville crisis have arisen (Filer 1990). I recently reviewed the ways in which company management at Porgera has sought to acquire knowledge about the social impact on the Ipili, the ethnic group surrounding the mine at Porgera (Burton n.d.). The Environmental Management and Monitoring Plan (EMMP), an essential part of the documentation required for mine approvals, noted the establishment of a socioeconomic liaison committee in 1991 (Porgera Joint Venture 1991:para 8.13). However, two years elapsed before this committee held a meeting, chaired by an official of the Department of the Environment and Conservation, the relevant government regulatory body. This meeting set my colleagues and I the task of writing a plan for what was termed the ‘Porgera Social Monitoring Program’, completed in June 1993 (Burton et al. 1993).

A series of monitoring reports was produced over an eighteen month period in 1993–94 (for example, Banks 1994; Bonnell 1994), but the program lapsed thereafter.

Two conclusions are notable here. The first is that although the company had a large community relations staff, only a handful were in managerial positions and perhaps only two or three incumbents held tertiary qualifications, none at higher than bachelor degree or diploma level. Outside Porgera, in particular, the numbers are made up of assistants with a typical Grade 6–10 education. This means that their ability to make basic investigations at community level was extremely limited; even if information were collected, no member of staff had the time to analyse it or to write policy documents of greater-than-memo length.

The second conclusion is that the patterns of secondary distribution and investment of compensation money remain unknown, as systematic research to find this out has not been done. There are grounds for suspecting the compensation passed from the company to the community without sufficient measures to protect the latter’s weaker members, such as women, infants, the aged, the children of single mothers, and people absent during assessments, such as those working outside the province. Documentation for a payment of K100,880 for clearance of an eight hectare land block shows members of a family received amounts ranging from K25,220 down to K140 (Department of Enga 1992). The beneficiary of the smallest amount, an infant, received 1/180th of the recipient of the greatest amount, a senior man. Does this mean that of the land compensated for, in adulthood the infant will be satisfied with only 1/180th of its inheritance? No, such a thing is ridiculous. Both company and provincial lands officers declined to use available legislation, such as the Land Groups Incorporation Act, to maximise fairness and accountability in decision-making over the pay-outs.

Even if suspicions of this nature are waved away, since the Porgera mine entered production in 1990, annual compliance reports for the Department of Environment and Conservation, mandatory under government guidelines, have not been submitted in respect of social impacts. Even if the activity reports of 1993 and 1994 count as compliance, this still leaves five years out of seven, 1990–96, with none submitted. If the Department of Environment and Conservation never asks for such reports, forgets to ask for them, or cannot read them if they are provided, the principle of best practice insists that a modern company acts as if it does. There is no excuse for failing in this; equally seriously, shareholders should be alarmed when any company fails to make a proper account of its activities to them. My full arguments run to some length, but assert that the company has blindfolded itself by failing to collect the kinds of knowledge that it requires to head off a serious crisis, a repetition of Ok Tedi’s example.