Q&A: Building trust and collaboration among mining stakeholders
[Editor’s Note: Over the past few weeks, R4D’s Leveraging Transparency to Reduce Corruption (LTRC) team reconnected with country experts and practitioners they have engaged with over the last couple of years to discuss their work together, and the challenges ahead. In a five-part series of interviews, they highlight the experiences and perspectives each of them have on strengthening extractives governance, transparency, and accountability. In this post, Miguel Cervantes Rodríguez highlights the challenges of improving governance and accountability in Peru mining and how a Community of Learning has helped to build trust among mining stakeholders.]
Could you tell us more about the activities of CCPM and the work you’re doing with Results for Development (R4D) under the LTRC initiative?
CCPM has been working on social management issues in Latin America for more than 10 years. We focus on advising governments, companies, and civil society organizations on developing and implementing strategies to help them achieve socially and environmentally responsive performance in the extractive projects being executed. We also focus on improving governance, with a special interest in the fight against corruption.
We are partnering with R4D to design and implement a new kind of neutral space for different mining stakeholders to exchange ideas and build trust amongst themselves. An offshoot of that approach is the Community of Learning we are fostering in Moquegua — a mining region in the south of Peru.
What are the challenges in trying to improve the governance of Peru’s mining sector, and how is CCPM working with stakeholders to mitigate these challenges?
The biggest challenge in relation to mining activity is that there are cumulative changes that are generated throughout the life cycle of a project that create significant impact on the area at the end. On one hand, we need to understand these complexities and focus on the relationship between the communities and the companies and also on the role of the government and other civil society organizations.
On the other hand, different stakeholders are involved in the mining process, each with different narratives and diagnoses of the problem. Most of the time, mining companies do not understand the context of the place where they intend to develop a project. They apply good practices such as local employment, local contracting, local opportunities, etc., but often these also generate negative impacts. It is essential that they understand the local context in order to contribute to the change desired by the communities.
In the case of Peru and Latin America in general, the ‘absence’ of government (I.e., lack of involvement) does not create an environment conducive to good engagement between companies and local communities. This is one of the main reasons why conflicts arise, besides communities’ high expectations of economic benefits as well as access to education and health services.
At CCPM, we focus on understanding the changes that are generated by the development of projects and the implications of the disconnect between companies and communities, due to lack of understanding on the part of the companies of the context in which they operate. The idea is to better understand these complexities and focus on fostering beneficial engagement between communities and companies, while recognizing the role of government and other civil society organizations.
What do these issues look like at the sub-national level, and how does that affect the governance of mining?
There has been a political crisis in Peru for several years. Peru is an extremely centralized country in which there have been attempts to decentralize, but this process has had challenges and failures. This means that many social services, which are the responsibility of the State, are not covering the mining communities. There are also great inequalities between mining regions and other regions, a potentially explosive situation.
When a company starts to work in a local community, it creates many expectations of opportunities and social change, but often the government does not participate in the process. This creates an unbalanced engagement, which is an important part of the problem. On one hand, we have the expectations of the mining community and the lack of government involvement in the process. On the other hand, mining companies often do not understand the context of the place where they intend to develop a project. This is a perfect scenario for major problems.
Another major challenge is the complexity of the technical processes involved in mining, especially during mine installation. In order to come to a joint solution, someone needs to explain the objectives of the project to the community, including the potential impacts and the opportunities. But in many cases, the communities do not understand the technical aspects of the project, which generates a seed of distrust that germinates over time.
Another issue is the lack of capacity in the local government. In the initial stage of a project, the local municipality receives a large amount of money but often lacks the capacity to invest it properly. As a result, this creates an incentive for corruption at the same time. There is a perfect mixture for big problems at all levels.
In a nutshell, we have the lack of presence of the government, high expectations on the part of the community, lack of understanding of the complexity of the context on the part of the mining company, and lots of money that create a massive incentive for corruption.
How are you mitigating these challenges?
There are specific problems in different regions. We believe that we can find solutions to these challenges through a Center for Community Learning and Practice that brings various stakeholders – mining communities, mining companies, academia, CSOs, professionals, etc. — together to discuss these problems and build a new tide of solutions for the region.
CCPM has collaborated in the implementation of the Community of Learning and Practice in Moquegua as part of the R4D and Brookings Institution’s Leveraging Transparency to Reduce Corruption initiative to improve mining governance in Moquegua. The idea is to create a space for different actors with different views on the problem in the region, a space that is neutral, that promotes trust building among stakeholders, that allows them to understand each other’s concerns and aspirations. In such a space, they have the opportunity to listen, understand and respond in a safe environment. Why is this important? Because existing spaces are mainly oriented towards negotiation or conflict resolution. In the end, in such spaces, the focus is on money or a goal that differs from trying to understand each other’s perspective amicably.
The community of learning and practice is not a space for negotiation, it’s a space for learning. There are currently 15 organizations and representatives involved in this space. They include The Roundtable for the Fight Against Poverty in Moquegua, the regional government of Moquegua, the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Moquegua, the Professional Association of Economists of Moquegua, and the mining company Anglo American.
So far, there have been five community of learning workshops in Moquegua, and now we have a foundational declaration. We are currently working on developing a work plan for the following year.
The community of learning and practice creates a neutral space for understanding and learning simultaneously. The community of learning and lractice members are not the only ones who are learning — we are also learning at CCPM. Creating a space for dialogue is not new, but bringing together these parties in mining is new.
Implementing a learning community in a region with mining-related conflicts is also new. Thanks to the constant feedback from Mario Picon, the director of LTRC and his team, R4D is learning from the process along with members of the learning community and us at CCPM.
The creation of this Learning and Practice Community has been a success because we designed it with the members from the beginning. We did not develop a proposal for the members to validate, but rather we interviewed each member, integrated their feedback, and held a series of workshops with them to develop the initiative.
Are there plans to replicate the community of learning and practice initiative outside Moquegua?
Each region has specific challenges. The main idea is not to build a one-size-fits-all model, but to understand the principles of the learning community that can be applicable to other spaces, systematize the process and then validate the tool over time. This is a pilot initiative, but we know that what we are learning and doing may be valuable for other regions in Perú. In contexts of conflict, the first big thing needed is to build trust.
One of the things we have learned from the five workshops we have organized for the Community of Learning and Practice is that different stakeholders talk about controversial things among themselves. For instance, they talk about investment-related issues, the problem of climate change, and sometimes they speak on new topics that change their mindset on relevant issues. They are learning, and the feedback they get from the Community of Learning is valuable. These changes give the opportunity to approach different people or stakeholders they may not have engaged with before.
We have also had different government and non-governmental organizations asking us about the progress of the process of the community of learning and practice.
In the past, you have said the Community of Learning would be the first step towards the establishment of a center of good governance in Peru. In your opinion, what is the next big challenge we should address to improve governance and accountability?
The Community of Learning and Practice is one pillar of our vision for a future center of good governance. There are two more that will complement it, once ready. One is an observatory to showcase the progress of the Community of Learning and Practice and the concerns of the community on a social listening platform. The other is a social laboratory to allow us to think of new practical approaches to solving common problems, such as communication and learning about mining technical issues in rural spaces. The three pillars are interconnected. They will lay the foundation for the future governance center that will formalize the practices of the Learning Community. The good governance center will be based on the proven pillars and focus specifically on the problems of a particular region. The participation of the people of the region will be vital to create and formalize the center in order to build solutions.
Miguel Cervantes Rodríguez is an Anthropologist with over 20 years of international experience working in Latin America’s extractive sector to analyze and understand community-company relationship dynamics in mining areas and provide innovative solutions that are mutually beneficial to prevent social conflicts.
As the founder and Managing Partner at CCPM Grupo Consultor, Miguel focuses on developing new approaches to understanding the complexity of the relationship between mining companies and local communities.
Catch up on the series
- Q&A: What’s next for Mongolia’s beneficial ownership transparency and anticorruption agenda
- Q&A: A multigenerational approach to Colombia’s energy transition
- Q&A: Building trust and collaboration among mining stakeholders
- Q&A: A civic-tech approach to budget and beneficial ownership transparency in Nigeria
- Q&A: Creating shared value for sustainable development in Peru’s extractive sector
