Dr Katherine Trebeck, Policy and Research Advisor for UK Poverty at Oxfam, talks about the relationships between indigenous Australians and miners to draw lessons on communities and power imbalances. The Whose Economy? seminars, organised by Oxfam Scotland and the University of the West of Scotland, brought together experts to look at recent changes in the Scottish economy and their impact on Scotland's most vulnerable communities. Held over winter and spring 2010-11 in Edinburgh, Inverness, Glasgow and Stirling, the series posed the question of what economy is being created in Scotland and, specifically, for whom? To find out more and view other Whose Economy? papers, presentations and videos visit: http://www.oxfamblogs.org/ukpovertypost/whose-economy-seminar-series-winter-2010-spring-2011/

1. Whose Economy?
UWS and Oxfam Seminar Series
Lessons from the Outback?
How Community Complexity Shaped Indigenous
Australians‟ Relationships with Miners
Inverness
Katherine Trebeck
Oxfam‟s UK Poverty Programme
March 25, 2011
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3. Lessons from the Outback...?
 Background
 Participation, negotiation,
deliberation, collective agreements
=> community ownership?
 Communities themselves are not
cohesive, they seldom engage as one
single voice, nor advocate an
uncontested position
 There are risks and caveats
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4. Community who?
 A community can be defined without
geographical borders
– as a body of people, with some
degree of shared history, values or
objectives
 Communities of fate a more useful
concept?
 The plural (communities) reminds us of
complexities and heterogeneity
 Stakeholders as a company‟s
„community‟
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5. The story
 Three mines
 Many communities
 Many demands
 Many tactics
 Many outcomes (civil
regulation)
 Whose success?
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20. Is the concept of „community‟ of any
use?
 Communities must deploy significant time and resources in order to bring
leverage to bear over miners
 Each instance of confrontation highlighted considerable sacrifice in
order to organise and attend protests of various kinds
 In terms of civil regulation it is invariably only those passionate enough;
with time (or choosing action in one realm at the expense of
participation in another)
= Burnout (exhaustion, resignation and eventually withdrawal)
Toby Gangele: “I‟ve given up. It‟s been six years now. I‟m not fighting
anymore”
 Formal engagement processes are also time and resource intensive
(agreement negotiations, meetings, and reviews all make great demands
on those involved)
 Only a small proportion of people will be able to directly and actively
involve themselves (ie those holding strong – although not necessarily
widely held – positions)
 This can lead to de facto representation (those speaking the loudest,
displaying most charisma or simply those who are able to dominate
others, those who conform to norms of discourse and eloquence)
- at the expense of those with little persuasive force or status?
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21. Community for whom?
 Little substantial political equality
between a company‟s stakeholders
 And between different elements within
communities themselves
= factions, divisions, tension, winners,
losers
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22. Are all represented?
 Feeling amongst some local Indigenous community
members that they had not been sufficiently included
in an agreement with the mining company
Eg „the forgotten Waanyi‟
= seeking alternative means – the sit-in – to achieve
their demands
 Considerable effort to understand the contours
between representative organisations and their
constituents, and the complex inter-community
dynamics
- Eg Rio Tinto‟s engagement with anthropologists,
sociologists and other „community experts‟ in this
process
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23. Substitution risk
 Government substituting royalty or other benefits derived
from mining in the place of government provision results in
a reduction of state finance for community services
 Communities may not gain any net financial benefit if
mining monies are used to finance services that
government would have provided anyway
 Perceptions that existing (or threatened) lack of
government delivery mean that some Indigenous
communities might acquiesce to mining if they view
mining as the only means to obtain necessary outcomes –
health and education services or employment, for example
 In some, already disadvantaged, localities Indigenous
communities are therefore understandably increasingly
looking to mining companies to deliver needed
infrastructure and services
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24. Who left to regulate whom?
 As partnerships between community organisations and
business proliferate, boundaries become blurred with
corporate provision of certain services demanded by
communities
 But, which sector of society will have sufficient independence
to restrain potential abuse of this broadening corporate role?
 Growing expectations that companies will respond to the
social demands of certain communities creates a potentially
dangerous situation where corporations, through their CSR
programs, assume some citizenship obligations traditionally
accorded to the state, while remaining beyond formal
democratic process
 When governments support corporate development (as they
did in all the case studies), the task falls again to
communities to monitor and hold companies accountable
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25. Whose win-win?
 The principal benefit companies could offer –
employment and training – was irrelevant to many
local Indigenous people who were either uninterested
or unable (due to health or safety requirements, for
example) to take up employment and training
opportunities
 Therefore many were excluded from the initiatives
offered by companies
 Conflation by industry of their interests and those of
Indigenous communities – implied in the assumption
that „mutual benefit‟ is possible – means that
Indigenous people are restricted to those benefits
offered and deemed appropriate by companies
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26. Lessons....?
 Are we really talking about
stakeholders?
 Are the risks worth it and
how can they be managed
and minimised?
 How might communities
position themselves?
 How can power imbalances
be addressed?
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27. To view all the papers in the Whose
Economy series click here
To view all the videos and presentations
from the seminars click here