Lian Sinclair

Since the 1990s, participation has become the dominant method for multinational mining corporations to contain conflict with people affected by mining. Yet conflict, including violent confrontation, remains prevalent. The literature documents a wide range of outcomes of participatory mechanisms – they may produce compromise, exacerbate conflict or even create new opportunities for conflict – yet there is little literature explaining such variance. This thesis explains this diversity in terms of (a) factors involved in the design and implementation of participatory mechanisms by multinational miners and (b) factors determining how, when and why people affected by mining participate or not. I use the ‘modes of participation’ framework to analyse how institutional and ideological foundations for participation shape who can participate, on what issues and when. I argue that participatory mechanisms including corporate social responsibility (CSR) and community development are neither simple outcomes of corporate ethics nor merely greenwashing strategies, as they are often presented. Rather, participation is a mechanism of rule to both contain manifestations of conflict risky to corporate profitability and create social relations amenable to extractive accumulation.

Qualitative data are drawn from fieldwork across three case studies in Indonesia – the proposed coastal Kulon Progo sand iron mine in Yogyakarta, Newcrest’s Gosowong gold mine in North Maluku and Rio Tinto’s ex-Kelian gold mine in East Kalimantan. These cases are placed within an analysis of global corporate self-governance that has arisen in response to broader crises of legitimacy. Findings highlight the importance of historically constituted social relations and contestation across local and global scales in shaping participation. Particularly important for how people affected by mining participate are their control of land, histories of organisation, alliance structures and ideologies. These factors shape the desire and capacity of people affected by mining to resist or secure benefits from participation in mining developments.

The 'common sense' view of Australian foreign policy in the South Pacific is that it is aimed at securing a stable and friendly near neighbourhood for Australia. Contrary to this view, this thesis argues that Australian foreign policy in the South Pacific is based upon an ideology of institutional neo-liberalism and is therefore mostly concerned with transforming governance structures within and around states in line with neo-liberal models of statehood. The Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI) is an Australian-led intervention and state-building initiative designed in response to the violence experienced in the Solomon Islands from 1998 to 2001 and the following years of state bankruptcy and criminality that plagued the South Pacific state. RAMSI has been commonly represented as a success story of international interventionism and state-building, however, I will argue that this representation is seriously flawed because of fundamental oversights in two key aspects of the intervention, caused by RAMSI’s ideological underpinnings. Firstly, causes of instability and violence in the Solomon Islands are reduced to ethnic conflict, poor governance and slow economic growth, while political and historical causes are ignored or seen as secondary. Therefore the central 'solutions' to the 'failure' of the state revolve around the implementation of 'good governance' and private sector led economic growth, whilst long standing grievances are ignored. Secondly, RAMSI is replicating, or even exacerbating, many of the same political-economic conditions that led to the violent conflict to which it is responding. The implications of this argument are that Australian foreign policy in the South Pacific is actually undermining its stated objective of promoting stability.