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.

“But at least it gives us hope.”

Continuing 2009 with the same theme I last mentioned in 2008…there are many striking stories in National Geographic’s cover story on gold this month. In trying to imagine 15 million people working on artisanl mines around the world, this quote from a miner in Peru hit me the hardest:

Many miners at La Rinconada don’t officially exist, either. There are no payrolls—just those bags of rocks—and some mine operators don’t even bother writing down workers’ names. Bosses, of course, can get rich on this kind of indentured servitude. The manager of one of La Rinconada’s larger operations says his mine yields 50 kilos (110 pounds) every three months—more than $5 million worth of gold each year. His workers, on their monthly cachorreo, each pull in an average of about ten grams (two-tenths of a pound) of gold, or around $3,000 a year. Despite the disparity, the miners do not rebel against the system; in fact, they seem to prefer the slim chance of winning big once a month in the mines to the dull certainty of low wages and chronic poverty in the fields. “It’s a cruel lottery,” says Juan Apaza, the gold-toothed miner up on the glacier. “But at least it gives us hope.”

I would have guess that the greatest demand from gold came from the North American and Europe. I was surprised to hear India (773.6 tons)  and China (363.3 tons) consumed much more than the US (278.1 tons) in 2007.

I also only got 3 of 6 on the gold quiz and continue to look at my wedding ring in new ways all the time.

The Spoils: Buried Treasure, Broken Nation

No roads lead to Bisie. This hidden town of 10,000 lies about 30 miles down a winding, muddy footpath through dense, equatorial forest. Built entirely for the mine, it is a cloistered world of expropriation and violence that mirrors the broad crisis in Congo.

This is Africa’s resource curse: The wealth is unearthed by the poor, controlled by the strong, then sold to a world largely oblivious of its origins.

The Spoils: Buried Treasure, Broken Nation is a series examining the role of natural resources in spurring conflict in Africa. The first installment is Congo’s Riches, Looted by Renegade Troops. Pictures speak louder than words – check out the narrated slide show.

While owned by a group of investors from the UK and South Africa, there is no real development of this project, partially as a result of the militia playing up concerns related to the group’s real intentions.

Mr. Christophers [of Mining and Processing Congo, the liscense owner] said that his company was prepared to help pay not just for a road to the mine but also for schools, clinics and a hydroelectric power station. It also promised to invite government agencies to enforce labor standards. But none of them have had the chance.

Indeed, some workers are suspicious of the company’s plans, fearing that a road would put thousands of porters out of work and that mechanized mining would drastically reduce employment here. The militia has tapped this unease to convince some workers and local officials that the company will simply abscond with the minerals and leave the local people empty-handed.

Very little thoughts on a solution, but such reports are vital in remembering how complex these situations can be. The simply promise of long-term development for many is not going to inspire people trying to survive today. None of this can be changed without improved security, obviously.  I cannot imagine a place like this getting better without improved governance, which seems a long way off in Easter DRC these days.

The Girl Effect

Um, I am a bit embarrassed that I started a blog and have not created a category for gender yet.  Via nextbillion.net, I found this creative site, which makes it really, really ridiculously simple to upload the video (cut > paste). I humbly post this to remind myself that gender plays a huge role in sustainability. Just today I was pondering a “strategy for the inclusion of gender” and this reminds me that it isn’t a box to check along the way.

Check out the Girl Effect site for yourself.

ICT – A Potential Game Changer?

Here’s a topic I hope to begin posting a bit more about: information communication technology (ICT) and sustainability, especially the newer tools that increase interaction among the stakeholders in the sustainability debate.

Perusing AccountAbility’s website, I came across an article from last summer in the Financial Times – Can Web 2.0 Revolutionise Corporate Responsibility? – and a video by the same gent, Steve Rochlin.

I am not a big fan of new terms and buzz words, but do think something is changing.  There is increased communication in a whole new array of platforms and with many new options for people to request and generate information. Feedback loops are exciting for improving public consultation, making reporting a lot more accountable and just linking up stakeholders in potentially beneficial ways.

Managing Waste, Not Making War

Here’s an attempt to connect some dots -

If one initiative in Liberia can train ex-combatants with skills to keep out of the violence business and get them into the sustainable development business, why can’t the private sector do the same thing? See this article: Innovative waste management training for former Liberian combatants launched.

The 200 ex-combatants benefiting from the programme, funded by the Federal Republic of Germany and implemented by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), will learn the fundamentals of waste management, and also learn to manufacture simple composting devices for converting waste into organic manure. In addition, the trainees will go into various communities to carry out clean-up campaigns, and educate the people on waste management through street theatre.

Meanwhile, in the northern part of the country, royalty money is potentially going to reignited violence, as explained in this story from Monrovia.

Internal Liberian politics aside, wouldn’t it be possible for some of the royalty money to be given to an organzation like IOM for such an initiative? Who would have to be sitting around the table for an idea like this to develop?

“Supporting Development in Indonesia”

Developing resources in a decentralizing country requires sustainable community development to promote synergies between corporate initiatives and local government goals.

A simple idea, but difficult to implement, is explained very well in this article from the October issue of E&P magazine, a publication covering the upstream oil and gas industry.

Working with local government and community leaders whose values, decision-making processes, and interests may differ from corporate approaches and priorities is challenging. However, showing respect for the local priorities and concerns and taking time to develop grassroots, site-specific approaches to development usually result in more meaningful sustainable development initiatives.

While this article focused on oil and gas and Indonesia, the message is equally applicable to other industries and countries, even if decentralization is not a trend.

Chad-Cameroon: Stop to Think

As a follower of the Chad-Cameroon pipeline, I think it is crucial for us to ponder the lessons from that project and beyond the lessons learned in implementation.

Here’s the World Bank statement.

Here is the New York Times story.

Here’s a more critical version of the development.

Having read these stories, it tells me that there is a much greater need for oversight and capacity building, as if that wasn’t obvious. And the argument that capacity building is enough for a project like this will be even harder the next time around as a result of this development. No easy answers here.