OK! Resources Cause Conflict – Now What’s the Business Role?

While I guess it can’t hurt to have an additional paper drawing attention to the role of natural resource managment in peacebuilding, I was somewhat disappointed with the lack of emphasis on the private sector in the UN Environmental Programme’s new report, ” From Conflict to Peacebuilding: The Role of Natural Resources and the Environment”. Contrary to the Forward section, I don’t think it is contorversial that natural resources and conflict are often linked. Many organizations, including the UN, have been making the case for many years. I hope the next research paper on the topic will address the sixth bullet of recommendation No. 5: “More systematic efforts are needed by the UN and national governments to engage the private sector in the development of policies on natural resources and the environment”.

It was the only reference to business or the private sector in the paper.

I still think this type of idea is needed more often.

Also, Paul Collier offered more good ideas in a paper for the EITI in October: “Implications of Changed International Conditions for EITI”.

ICMM Case for Partnerships at Local, National and Global Levels

Catching up on overdue reading over the weekend…

ICMM’s Kathryn McPhail won the Bronze Award for the International Finance Corporation (IFC)/Financial Times (FT) essay competition for her essay, “Sustainable Development in the Mining and Minerals Sector: The Case for Partnership at Local, National and Global Levels”. While always a good source of materials, I found this document of the Resouce Endowment Initiative to be one of the better articulated cases about the importance of of companies working with government at the sub-national level. I was shaking my head a lot.

I am impressed by the ICMM process, which appears to use a transparent methodology that it keeps open to input from a wide variety of stakeholders.

Sustainable Social Investment – Great Resource!

The IPIECA has always been on my “Resources”-roll, but if you were like me, the IPIECA doesn’t sound like an appealing detour while blog perusing. It stands for International Petroleum Industry Environmental Conservation Association and might bore away non-petroleum people, but would be too bad. I have been finding some helpful resources on their website related to social responsibility and social investment in particular. Social investment isn’t to be confused with socially responsible investing. Rather it is the “voluntary contributions companies make to the communities and broader societies where they operate”. Some call it CSR or community investment. No matter what it is called, the main point is that it should be approached with the same business sense as any other element of a company’s work.

Creating Successful, Sustainable Soical Investment is really a useful and resource-rich document for any business investing in community development initiatives. The Executive Summary (almost three pages) gives away all the good answers and the Resources section in the Appendix has lots of places to get additional information.

One lesson learned that can’t be stressed enough is that “how the company engages determines success more than what the company does”. I have learned this time and again. And for companies spending millions of £, $, € or nakfa, it is hard to understand how even the smallest expenses need to be spent in a way that will not generate suspicion. How matters, as we have been hearing a lot lately!

I can’t say I agreed with every point, but on the whole, an extremely useful document.

The document, I have learned, was written by the Corporate Engagement Project,  I didn’t have them on my Resources list…until now.

Green for All

I really enjoyed The New Yorker profile of Van Jones, “Greening the Ghetto”. Jones has written the Green Collar Economy and is the founder of an organization called Green for All. The subtitle of piece in The New Yorker was a question: Can a remedy serve for both global warming and poverty? Jones seems to think the answer is absolutely, yes, though at times he admits his push to get green economy thinkers to add the topic of urban poverty to the equation has been new territory that he didn’t understand along the way.

There is another answer to the question at the end of the article from a professor of business and government at Harvard. He gives an analogy:

Let’s say I want to have a dinner party. It’s important that I cook dinner, and I’d also like to take a shower before the guests arrive. You might think, Well, it would be really efficient for me to cook dinner in the shower. But it turns out that if I try that I’m not going to get very clean and it’s not going to be a very good dinner. And that is an illustration of the fact that it is not always best to try to address two challenges with what in the policy world we call a single-policy instrument.

Jones has his own answer, but a better answer to that was in the letters a few issues later:

In Elizabeth Kolbert’s piece on Van Jones and his attempt to address both poverty and the environmental crisis, the Harvard professor Robert Stavins suggests that it might not be effective to address climate and poverty together (“Greening the Ghetto,” January 12th). If climate were purely a technical issue—an efficiency challenge—he might be right. But climate disruption is at least as much about equity as efficiency. The prosperity that some of us enjoy is powered primarily by fossil fuels. If we are to deliver real climate solutions, we must build a new prosperity powered by efficient use of clean energy. This new prosperity must be “sustainable” not only in the sense that it can last but also in the sense that it works for a lot more people than our current (faltering) prosperity does. This is both a moral imperative and a practical political one. The rich cannot tell the poor, “Sorry, the atmosphere is already full of the emissions that created our prosperity, so there’s no room for yours.” If reducing emissions amounts to hoarding wealth, the coal and oil lobbies will successfully resist effective climate policy by appealing to the economic interests of the poor and the middle class. In order to avoid catastrophic climate disruption, our economic vision must include more broadly shared prosperity.

K. C. Golden

Policy Director, Climate Solutions

At a time when it is hard to get your head around the environmental complexity, I appreciate the way a person like Jones reminds us that we can’t solve a problem like the environmental in isolation.

Syllabus on Mining Issues with “Broad Implications”

Via ICMM’s useful news feed, I got news that the Aspen Institute’s Centre for Business Educaiton held a conference for MBA faculty that resulted in a course syllabus on “Five Issues with Broad Implications” for the mining and metals industry. Those five issues happen to be…

• Sustainability and Core Operations
• Global Portability of Governance and Agreements
• Shareholder Activism and Other Levers of Change
• Taking a Role in Pressing Social Issues: HIV/AIDS
• Managing Accidents, Crises and Risks

Each issue as some good references with links, though most are articles that require purchase.