Cannot Manage without The ‚Significant Other’: Mining, Corporate Social Responsibility and Local Communities in Papua New Guinea

The increasing pressure from different facets of society exerted on multinational companies (MNCs) to become more philanthropic and claim ownership of their impacts is now becoming a standard practice. Although research in corporate social responsibility (CSR) has arguably been recent (see subsequent section), the application of activities taking a voluntary form from MNCs seem to vary reflecting a plethora of factors, particularly one obvious being the backwater local communities of developing countries where most of the natural extraction projects are located. This chapter examines views of two Papua New Guinea (PNG) local communities hosting large-scale mining operations and explains the demands arising from situational relativities, which are becoming too conspicuous for mine developers not to ignore. The research undertaken with several assertions highlights the perceived imperativeness allowing companies to integrate the CSR into the essential management pursuits of running mines in PNG. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2007Corporate social responsibility, community relations, indigenous local communities, multinational mining companies,

That Which Doesn’t Break Us: Identity Work by Local Indigenous ‘Stakeholders’

Camisea, glocalization, identity work, Indigenous, stakeholder relations,

Women's and Men's Work: The Production and Marketing of Fresh Food and Export Crops in Papua New Guinea

© 2019 Oceania Publications Fresh food markets have been a fixture of the social and economic landscape of urban and rural PNG since colonial times. They were often the first points of engagement with the market economy, especially for women, who as small-scale producers, sold surplus produce from their food gardens located on communally-owned land. Although local food markets have remained an important livelihood for women, the later adoption and expansion of perennial export cash crops like coffee and cocoa overshadowed food production for local markets as men dominated export crop production on land alienated from communal ownership for decades or permanently. New forms of social relations of production and more exclusive forms of land tenure emerged to accommodate export crop production that were very different from those governing the production and marketing of fresh food. Market values and a trend towards individualisation of production with less capacity to mobilise labour through reciprocal labour exchange networks have characterised export crop production. With the income benefits captured largely by men, women began redirecting their labour to fresh food production where they were able to exercise more control of production and income while still mobilising labour through indigenous labour exchange arrangements. Attempts by men to appropriate the income of women and sons’ labour in export cropping were greater during flush periods when income levels were high, and they were less likely to attempt to appropriate this income in low crop periods when incomes were lower. However, with the recent emergence of female entrepreneurers earning relatively large sums of money in large-scale, profit-driven vegetable production, the moral frameworks governing food production are coming to resemble those governing export crops, and making labour more difficult to mobilise. Despite women being key players in these changes, we argue there is an emerging risk that men will attempt to assert control over this income or move into vegetable production themselves and possibly marginalise women in the process

Evolution of endemismon a young tropical mountain

Tropical mountains are hot spots of biodiversity and endemism(1-3), but the evolutionary origins of their unique biotas are poorly understood(4). In varying degrees, local and regional extinction, long-distance colonization, and local recruitment may all contribute to the exceptional character of these communities(5). Also, it is debated whether mountain endemics mostly originate from local lowland taxa, or from lineages that reach the mountain by long-range dispersal from cool localities elsewhere(6). Here we investigate the evolutionary routes to endemism by sampling an entire tropical mountain biota on the 4,095-metre-high Mount Kinabalu in Sabah, East Malaysia. We discover that most of its unique biodiversity is younger than the mountain itself (6 million years), and comprises a mix of immigrant pre-adapted lineages and descendants from local lowland ancestors, although substantial shifts from lower to higher vegetation zones in this latter group were rare. These insights could improve forecasts of the likelihood of extinction and 'evolutionary rescue'(7) in montane biodiversity hot spots under climate change scenarios