CommDev: Tools

Tools are a selective action/learning oriented subset of the topics covered in this website that answer the question - "how to" implement community development strategies. The tools offer specific manuals and guidelines for extractive industry companies, communities, civil society, government officials and community development practitioners to ensure that extractive industry projects are developed in the best way possible from the outset, yielding clear and sustainable benefits for local communities. CommDev is currently working with partners to develop new tools to fill identified gaps, which will be available shortly.

Community Investment Strategies: Community Development is the process of increasing the strength and effectiveness of communities, improving peoples’ quality of life, and enabling people to participate in decision-making to achieve greater long-term control over their lives. This involves empowering and helping communities to improve their social and physical environments, increase equity and social justice, overcome social exclusion, build social capital and capacities, and be involved in assessment and decision-making processes that influence local conditions.
Communications: Local communities tend to be viewed as those “outside” the company gates. In reality, however, a good part of a companies workforce may be part of these communities or reside among them. Whether implicitly or explicitly, employees communicate messages about the company and the project to the outside world and help to create perceptions as well as pass along information. This provides a great opportunity for companies to leverage this built-in channel of communications as a means of outreach and dissemination to the local population. Feedback from the local workforce can also be a way to identify emerging issues and concerns of local communities. Companies who do this well make an effort to keep their employees well-informed, involve them in the company’s stake-holder engagement strategy, and recruit their help as front-line ambassadors in relationship-building with the local population.
Corporate Social Responsibility: Corporate Social Responsibility has been defined by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development as “the continuing commitment by business to behave ethically and contribute to economic development while improving the quality of life of the workforce and their families as well as of the local community and society at large.” Corporate social responsibility is seen as having five themes: 1) human rights, 2) worker rights, 3) environmental impact, 4) community involvement, 5) supplier relations and monitoring.
Environment / Natural Resources Management: Management and preservation of natural environments, ecological systems, and biodiversity are essential for sustainable economic, social, cultural and business development. Environmental concerns linked to extractive industry include water quality, use of mercury, waste disposal, land grading, deforestation, gas flaring, oil spills, disruption to ecosystems, and climate change. A key to successfully coordinating efforts and reducing environmental threats is to incorporate multiple stakeholders into the project design, implementation and monitoring.
Financial Valuation Tool (FV Tool): There is a growing expectation globally that large scale investments by oil, gas and mining industries will bring broad-based benefits to local communities. In order to be a good neighbor, manage high expectations of governments and host communities, access land and manage risks, many extractive industry companies invest millions of dollars in diverse local sustainability programs such as infrastructure development, vocational training, skills development and support to a variety of local institutions and stakeholder groups. These sustainability investments create both benefits to the local communities as well as significant business value to companies.
Human Rights: Human rights refer to the basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled often including: security, liberty, equality, political expression, welfare, and due process. Many companies recognize that respect for human rights is a fundamental part of being a responsible business and many have begun to integrate human rights considerations into their mainstream decision-making. As a result there is a growing aspiration to understand more clearly where human rights challenges may lie in existing and future business operations, rather than simply reacting to individual challenges as they arise.
Local Conflict Management: The design and implementation of sustainable community investment and related programs in the context of extractive development projects requires careful analysis and implementation to optimize positive benefits and avoid generation of additional strife and conflict. The right decisions and actions on community relations, social investment, local hiring, environmental protection, and security arrangements can contribute to economic growth and prosperity in affected communities. While some tensions and conflicts are unpredictable, many can be anticipated through adequate contextual and social analysis of the different stakeholders. Three conflict management strategies are conflict identification, conflict mapping and conflict resolution. These stages are useful throughout the operational life-cycle of an extractive industry company’s project. Extractive companies can adopt a range of strategies for managing conflict impacts.
Local Procurement / Local Supplier Development: Local procurement refers to the purchase of goods and services from local businesses. Typically, this occurs in emerging markets and in developed markets where local communities have expectations about participating in new opportunities. Also known as business linkages, local supplier development, local content or local sourcing, local procurement is increasingly favored as a strategic business tool by international companies
Monitoring and Evaluation: Effective Monitoring & Evaluation of community development programs can improve management, accountability, participation, trust, learning, efficiency and development impacts. Monitoring is as much about building relationships, trust and mutual learning as it is about collecting and reporting data. Wide participation in monitoring is critical because diverse stakeholder groups are working towards overlapping but not precisely the same goals.
Partnerships and Stakeholder Engagement: Partnerships generally involve voluntary agreement, shared objectives, distinct accountabilities and reciprocal obligations and are expected to add value to what each partner could achieve alone. Less common are partnerships between industry, government, civil society, and communities--though when well planned and managed, such arrangements can build on the strengths and capabilities of each actor to produce greater and more sustainable development impacts as well as profits. Strategic partnerships can help define local priorities for social investment, assign responsibilities, apportion costs, mitigate risks, establish accountabilities, improve productivity and resolve conflicts. Ideally, partnership avoids duplication of effort, capitalizes on each actor’s expertise, and pools resources to tackle the most challenging and complex social and business problems.
Royalty Management: Many countries rely on revenues collected from extractive industries in the form of taxes, royalties and production shares. For some states these revenues can be the sole source of funding for social development and economic growth. Unfortunately, in some countries, the lack of accountability and transparency in revenue management can exacerbate poor governance, leading to corruption, conflict and increasing inequality. Campaigns such as the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative combined with more inclusive governing approaches, such as participatory budgeting, show promise for improving the impact that extractive revenues have on community welfare. Capacity building for government, civil society including media, and companies is essential to take advantage o finite extractive resources.