2006, Luke Danielson / Global Public Policy Institute
This paper is a personal history of the MMSD project and has several purposes. First, it is intended as an administrative history of a major global public policy process, designed to be helpful to people who are thinking about developing, managing, or participating in such projects in the future, especially those who believe, as I do, in the fundamental importance of such processes at this stage of evolution of global institutions. It is intended as a learning tool. It focuses on questions of architecture, administration, and the practical decisions that had to be taken.
Second, it is intended to inform: to provide some raw material for the growing body of scholars who are examining global public policy processes, their potential, and how to improve them.
Third, it is intended, in at least in some respects, as an agenda of what is to be done: to be helpful to stakeholders in the mineral sector, who are deeply engaged in efforts to improve performance of the minerals industries so that they can contribute to a better life for the 6 billion people who use their products.
Finally, it is intended to help with assessment: to be one input into some future evaluation of the MMSD project, should that be undertaken.
Thus, this paper itself is not an evaluation of the results of MMSD. A real evaluation would involve many variables, most of which have yet to be identified. There is no accepted metric for evaluating a policy process such as this one. And evaluation simply cannot be done in the absence of some broadly accepted criteria against which the process can be judged.
There are many suggestions as to the appropriate metric for this kind of evaluation: What percentage of the project’s recommendations has been adopted? Has the project improved social, environmental and economic performance of the minerals industry worldwide? Did it meet the objectives stated in the Scoping Study from which it originated? Has it facilitated better dialogue among actors who are in conflict? Has its research led to key new intellectual insights? Is there a greater degree of trust? Has it accelerated the process of convergence among the key actors on a set of clearly understood norms or standards for the minerals industry?
Who decides which of these or other suggested ways of measurement is most important, or how to rank them? To be credible, an evaluation would need to be independent of the people who managed the project. Since I am the project’s former Director, this paper does not pretend to be an independent evaluation.
These four purposes are very different from each other. This suggests that this story should be told in several different papers, or perhaps that this paper should be divided into separate compartments, each designed to address a single purpose.
The author has chosen not to do that. It would require a tremendous amount of repetition of some basic background information. There are a number of these observations that may be useful for several purposes. A long paper on an abstract subject needs some life, and I am concerned that this kind of division would rob the story of what vitality it might have.
In order to best serve these purposes, this paper follows a set of ground rules. In a productive dialogue, a considerable number of things need to be said in confidence. That confidence has to be respected. It would be a very serious disservice to the cause of building dialogue if—in the interest of post facto research, or just telling a good story—those confidences were breached. There have to be some ground rules about what can be said and what cannot be said in a paper like this.
This paper is written subject to at least three sets of rules, which were largely discussed, agreed, and understood as the basis for conduct of the project:
- The MMSD Principles of Engagement.
- The Chatham House Rule.
- Keeping promises. When in the course of the project people said things under either an explicit or implicit pledge of confidentiality, that pledge will be honoured. At times, revealing statements without revealing their source may be consistent with that pledge. In other cases, it may be that the promise can only be kept by continued silence.
Following such rules may cheat the reader of some titillating stories, but in my view does not detract much from the purpose of this paper, because with care the issues and principles may be laid bare consistent with the rules under which we chose to work, and to which we continue to adhere.
The paper is divided into six sections. The first four are a more or less chronological account of the project from what the author refers to as Stage 1, its conception, through the development of the concept, the establishment of the project, and the full operational phase. There is then Section V, which is a conceptual exploration of issues of process, and finally Section VI, which focuses on some key problems and issues.
That final section contains a much more detailed distillation of some of the most important lessons from the project. In the "big picture" it seems that some of the more difficult questions for global public policy processes include: (i) the extent to which we need global processes; (ii) why we need broad representation of different stakeholders; (iii) how we solve the linked issues of the lack of capacity of some important stakeholders to engage effectively at the global level, and (iv) the quite closely related question of representation and who speaks for whom.
