stake holder engagement

Answer

1. • Stakeholder Engagement Plan and the notion of Sustainable Operations

     EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

     The long term success of the company and its viability depend on how much that company is willing to invest in sustainable practices within its operations. This paper proposes a stakeholder engagement plan that is aimed at introducing the idea of sustainability in the operations of the company. In attempting to do so, it explains in the background some of the terms that are associated with sustainability like smart cities, stakeholder engagement, local government and maturity models. This study found out that there are various problems that are associated with developing and executing a viable sustainability plan. These problems include limited resources, lack of commitment from internal stakeholders, political factors, heterogeneous concerns and increased urbanization. The solution to these problems would be committing more finances towards sustainability efforts, selection of areas with favourable political climate that encourages sustainability, addressing stakeholder and sustainability concerns one by one and carefully managing the people who flock to mining areas. The study concludes that the challenges of stakeholder engagement have to be addressed before the goals of sustainability can be realized.

      

      

      

      

      

      

      

     TABLE OF CONTENTS

     TITLE PAGE…………………………………………………………………………………1

     EXECUTIVE SUMMARY…………………………………………………………………..3

     INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………………4

     BACKGROUND……………………………………………………………………………..4

     Maturity Models……………………………………………………………………...4

     Smart Cities…………………………………………………………………………..6

     Stakeholder engagement……………………………………………………………..6

     Local Government…………………………………………………………………...7

     ANALYSIS…………………………………………………………………………………...8

     Limited resources……………………………………………………………………..8

     Lack of Commitment from internal Stakeholders……………………………………9

     Political Factors………………………………………………………………………10

     Heterogeneity of concerns……………………………………………………………10

     Urbanisation………………………………………………………………………….11

     CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………………12

     RECOMMENDATIONS…………………………………………………………………….12

     REFERENCES……………………………………………………………………………….13

      

     INTRODUCTION

     In many areas of operations currently, the idea of sustainability is explored. Mining operations is one of the areas that can have severe impacts on the environment and the people who work there if the operations are not streamlined and thought out with sustainable ideas in mind. This report looks at the plans that are developed to introduce sustainability into the mining operations. The initial background will assess an explanation of concepts that include maturity models, smart cities, stakeholder engagement and local government. It then looks at a critical analysis of the problems that are experienced around the topic of sustainability. In the end, it presents some possible practical solutions to some of the problems discussed, all with the intention of providing a sustainability plan that can be instrumental to the mining operations, making sure that productivity is balanced with the environmental impact of our operations.

     BACKGROUND

     Maturity Models

     A maturity model specifies the development of particular capabilities of an organization over time. These models for a particular capability make use of empirical data found from studying companies that demonstrate varied levels of the capability of interest. Maturity models include four or five levels of maturity, and each level is organised in a way that it stands for a greater degree of competency than the previous one. This work identifies four levels: beginning, improving, succeeding and leading. These levels have very specific set of behaviours, processes, tools and outcomes that a company at that given level of competency must demonstrate. These levels are assigned scores that a company at that level has as illustrated in the diagram below:

      

     Maturity Level	Dimension score	Primary Focus
     Beginning	0-10	Regulatory compliance
     Improving	11-20	Sustainability considered in NPD, for suppliers and in reporting metrics
     Succeeding	21-30	Sustainability included throughout much of the enterprise, including NPD, marketing, public metrics, reporting and used as a competitive advantage in some markets
     Leading	31-40	Sustainability fully integrated throughout the enterprise, viewed not as an initiative but rather as the way the company does business.

      

     Assessment scores and maturity models

     Source: Hynds et. al. (2014)

     Knowing that the impact of the mining industry on the ecological and geological environment is massive, the maturity model suggested would draw from the opinion of Bourne (2016) who created a framework as part of a study to understand the relationship between the adoption of environmental strategies and green product development. By analysing publicly available company documents with regard to environmental awareness, the study categorized companies as having either a low or high sustainability maturity level based on four environmental strategies:

     • Improvement of material eco-efficiency
     • Improvement of energy efficiency
     • Implementation of green management (the development of a systematic and comprehensive process to improve a company’s environmental and business performance), and
     • Implementation of green supply-chain management practices

      

     Smart Cities

     A Smart City is a town, municipality, or urban location that uses information and communication technology to improve operational efficiency, disseminate information to the public and improve both the quality of government service delivery and the welfare of the inhabitants. In these cities, there is data collected electronically then the conclusions made out of this collected data are used to manage services efficiently in order to ultimately improve the quality of service delivery across that city. Paramount to my development of a sustainability plan would be the introduction of smart city technologies in and around the mining areas. The potential emission of toxic gases into the environment due to the mining operations would call for an improvement in energy distribution and improvement of air quality with the help of cloud-based IoT applications (Samih 2019). The priority would be to ensure that the mining workers and other stakeholders engage with smart city ecosystems in varied ways using smartphones and mobile devices. Pairing the devices and data with the company’s physical infrastructure and services would cut costs and enhance sustainability.

      

     Stakeholder engagement

     Stakeholder engagement has to do with a systematic communication, negotiation and interaction among stakeholders with the aim of influencing the output of a particular process. The absence of stakeholder engagement during any point of the cycle of a sustainability plan especially in the earlier stages of planning and implementation negatively impacts the expected outcomes of the plan. The consequences of lack of contextual knowledge from the stakeholders, added to their lack of support in the field makes the case for a stakeholder engagement even more acute. My specific goal while coming up with a sustainability plan would be to provide a framework to enhance the effectiveness of stakeholder engagement of the projects. This would be done both by ranking the potential conflicts of the stakeholders in terms of the mining operations or the impacts that those operations have on various sectors and combining the viewpoints of the stakeholders with those of the project management team. The application of a stakeholder engagement framework would ensure that the sustainable goals are well understood by everyone within the company to ward off any potential conflicts of interests that may emanate between the stakeholders and the management. The questions to ask in any stakeholder engagement include who the relevant stakeholders are, what their interests entail, the power they have and how they are likely to form coalitions.

     Local Government

     Local governments are the jurisdictions under which most of the mining activities that are undertaken by the company operate. They have rule and regulations that are part and parcel of the legal framework for the operation of the mining activities. Once laws are passed at the federal level of government, it is the responsibility of the local government to ensure that these legislations function at the local level (Rachel et al. 2019). Every level of government has a role to play in sustainability. Legislations like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act have greatly improved the quality of lives and the environment. The local governments have considerable power and influence to determine whether the policies they implement encourage sustainability or unsustainability. A good example of how local governments can exert their influence can be seen in areas where they are largely influential like land use and development (Mori et al, 2014). The local government can use regulations, building and mining codes that promote sustainable development. Alternatively, and detrimentally, these governments can perpetuate unsustainable development that exhausts open space and farmland, increasing pollution and encouraging fossil fuel burning.

     Due to the obvious toll that mining usually takes on the environment, it would be prudent to adhere to local government edicts and regulations that specify areas that are off-limits for mining activities and those that make the idea of sustainability an obligation for mining firms. These are the laws that would guide the sustainability plan and inform the extent of our operations within the locality in which the company operates.

      

     ANALYSIS

     Limited Resources

     The development of a sustainability plan and the implementation of that plan require the availability of resources. The stakeholders then must be engaged to provide the needed resources that are to be used to meet certain environmental expectations and measures that support sustainability (Justice and Casadevall, 2019). One of the ways through which sustainability can be achieved is through the use of modern information technology and innovations in mining that would reduce the emission of toxic substances for example and improve the air quality in and around the mining sites. Often, the acquisition of such technologies is expensive and requires the effort of the stakeholders and their understanding of the need to offer solutions to apparent problems that may have severe impacts on the environment. The insufficient resources may also affect the capability of the company to have buildings and equipment that help in achieving the sustainable goals that are set in the models as discussed above.

     The solution then is to ensure that the stakeholders can contribute in providing the equipment and resources needed to acquire those technologies that encourage sustainability (Kaur and Lodhia, 2018). In addition, these resources would also be instrumental in the company’s corporate responsibility of ensuring that any damages done to the environment are identified and mitigated against.

      

     Lack of commitment from Internal Stakeholders

     In any given company, the stakeholders have varied interests. The existence of interests makes the prioritisation of issues difficult because each stakeholder has different interests. What is important for one stakeholder may not be the priority for another. Sustainability is not cheap, it comes with added costs. This therefore means that at least in the initial implementation of sustainability practices, the operational costs would go up causing the potential profit margins to drop (Hashmi et al., 2015). Most internal stakeholders then may fail to get committed to the task of promoting sustainable practices thereby derailing the efforts for sustainability. Whenever this happens, the goals of sustainable development and operations are in jeopardy.

     Solving the problem of lack of commitment is not simple for the reason that the varied interests will always exist. However, it would be important to make the stakeholders see that while the attainment of sustainable goals would be expensive in the short term, they ultimately lead to cheaper consequences in the end because there would be less wastage and possibly even the recycling of some equipment that would rather be discarded. In addition, the stakeholders must see that sustainability is about the future and the potential of the mining company to continue their operations for a longer time (Neil, 2020). Exploiting unsustainable practices would inevitably drive the company out of the business because of extremely high operation costs or the incapability of the environment to withstand any more exploitation (Kaur and Lodhia, 2019). The stakeholders must also see that sustainability builds and repairs relationships between the company and the communities within which they operate.

     Political Factors

     While the stakeholders may be the stumbling blocks to the adoption of sustainable practices for the company, the other challenge may be the unfavourability of the political climate. It is the politics of a country and a locality that determine whether or not they are interested in the sustainability of the operations of a company. In jurisdictions where there are no strict rules and regulations that guide mining operations for example, the longevity of operations is always in question because there is an unbridled quest to exploit resources and not care about the repercussions that such actions have on the environment (Huzzard 2020). In such cases, even the stakeholders themselves may fail to see reasons why they would be obligated to have sustainable goals in mind. In cases where there are strict regulations and limits of operations, then it would be prudent to have sustainability plans that take into considerations the requirements of the laws that exist.

     Solving the problem of the political factors is difficult because mostly, it is external to the operations of the company. However, the stakeholders can be persuaded to look at areas with regulations that guide sustainability if they are interested in the long term viability of the mining operations. Following sustainable practices makes it easier to plan for the long haul and determine the future success of the company

     Heterogeneity of concerns

     In many instances, there are heterogeneous concerns that have to be addressed for the goal of sustainability to be said to be accomplished. There are concerns about the workers themselves, the area of operation, the nature of operations, the emission of gases and wastes into the environment and the types of buildings that the company has (Okan et al, 2015). Handling all these concerns, added to the other challenges too, make the task of sustainability difficult to accomplish

     The solution would be to handle one concern at a time. Handling one concern at a time makes the company focused and limits the possibility that there is a mix-up in what concern to deal with. It also makes the task seem less overwhelming for the company to attain.

     Urbanisation

     The challenge of urbanisation is seen in the increasing statistics that capture the increasing trend of people moving to the urban areas. Currently, about half of the world’s population live in urban areas and the projection is estimated to potentially hit about 60% by 2030 (Ramin 2010). The high number of people living in urban areas presents a unique challenge to the development of a sustainable plan. Population growth coupled with urbanisation results in considerable impacts on the environment and other potential problems like increased ambient temperature, decreased air quality, increased water run-off, decreased quality of runoff water, loss of natural beauty and deforestation. Some of these impacts also have further consequences. Deforestation for instance is linked to loss of biodiversity, global warming, soil erosion and desertification. In relation to mining activities, the movement of people to the mining areas may cause an increased an increased demand for housing around the mining areas, eventually leading to development of informal settlements. The added challenges of inadequate lung space, traffic, congestion and the problems with runoff systems that may exacerbate the problem of floods are areas that all stakeholders have to take into consideration (Rhodes et al 2014). Stakeholders have to adopt measures that address the increasing number of people moving to the mining area, including finding out sustainable ways in which they would work, move and live.

      

     CONCLUSION

     There are challenges of limited resources, lack of stakeholder commitment, unfavourable political factors, heterogeneity of concerns and increased urbanisation that threaten the goal of attaining sustainability goals for the company. There has to be more financial commitment by the stakeholders, determination of areas that have favourable political legislation, specific handling of sustainability concerns and plans to manage increasing populations in mining areas so that the goals of sustainable development are achieved.

     RECOMMENDATIONS

     This paper suggests the following recommendations:

     • Allocate more financial resources for sustainability efforts
     • Assess the political climate as part of initial pre-operational study
     • Handle stakeholder and sustainability concerns one at a time
     • Develop sustainable ways of managing the increasing number of people moving to mining areas.