The Centre for Social Responsibility in Mining (CSRM) at the Sustainable Minerals Institute (SMI) has released the final report from a project entitled ‘Mining and local-development: Examining the gender dimensions of agreements between companies and communities’.
Funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and the Minerals Council of Australia (MCA), the research explores the challenges and opportunities associated with negotiating and implementing agreements by considering issues relating to gender and local-level development. The focus is on agreement processes between local communities and Australian mining companies operating domestically and offshore.
The two-year program of work included a practitioner perspectives study and case studies at three mining operations in different regions of the world:
- Papua New Guinea (Newcrest’s Lihir mine)
- Lao PDR (MMG Sepon LXML operations)
- Australia (Rio Tinto Alcan’s Weipa operation).
A project report summarises the findings of these four components of the research and provides a list of key tools and guidance documents for practitioners and policy makers.
Each of these components is available on the CSRM website .
The CSRM hope that this report contributes to an industry-wide discussion of gender and mining.