Another view on the economy of minerals

We need to rethink the traditional relationship between industrial resource extraction and local development, writes Transparency International’s François Valérian.

Our traditional approach to the link between industrial exploitation of underground wealth and local development is fundamentally flawed. While there is ample recognition that industrial corporations have to help local development where they operate, the rationale behind such efforts is rarely articulated. Implicit rationale is most often to buy some kind of local peace through community investment. More theoretical and acceptable explanations make extensive use of the “sustainability” concept, but this concept is too broad to have a concrete efficacy, since it mainly refers to the duration of the industrial operation and could be used for the sole economic management of a non-renewable resource as well as for any long-lasting environmental impact. Another widely used concept is the one of “stakeholder”, one of the stakeholders of the mining operation being the local population, but even the concept of stakeholder is of poor use if we are not more precise on how we define the stake. Most definitions oppose the stake of a stakeholder to the share of shareholder, and therefore define the stakeholder in a negative manner, as a non-shareholder who has to somehow be taken care of. Generally speaking, all measures that refer to sustainable development or stakeholders’ interests are construed as corrective measures, external to the real transaction which is purely industrial and financial.

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