Category Archives: EITI Mongolia

TRUST AND TRANSPARENCY

Jocelyn Fraser, PhD student in Mining Engineering // Jan 22, 2015

As representatives of international governments, business and civil society gather together this week at the World Economic Forum, delegates are grappling with issues similar to those faced by the EITI: securing economic growth and social inclusion, and enhancing environment and resource security. Making progress on these matters requires the participation of multi-stakeholder groups committed to transparency – of which there are many. It also requires trust – of which there is little.

According to the 2015 Edelman Trust Barometer, the past year brought a sharp decline in trust in public institutions and business as gains of recent years were swept away in a series of disasters and mismanagement ranging from data hacks to mysterious air crashes, from financial scandals to Ebola. The Trust Barometer findings are echoed in research by Globescan (Viewpoints for Business in 2015) that shows national governments, global companies, media, and even the United Nations, all scoring negative trust ratings. In both cases, the research suggests that citizens want stronger regulation of business yet have little confidence that policy makers can develop, implement and enforce the rules.

Transparency is a key driver of trust. And earning trust will be a critical requirement as the EITI seeks to implement stronger provisions for tracking transfers of resource revenues to sub-national tiers, and to address issues associated with shell companies (corporate entities that are little more than a mailing address in a foreign tax haven) and transfer pricing (the manipulation of costs and prices to reduce tax liability). These focus areas are in addition to the EITI’s ongoing effort to account for revenues lost to corruption and bribery, an amount the World Bank estimates at US$1T annually in the global oil and gas and mining sectors.

How will Mongolia, with its numerous opportunities for economic advancement through resource development, manage these issues? As an EITI member country, are there lessons to be learned from the experience of other members, or from initiatives such as Dodd Frank, the EU directive on transparency, or Britain’s legislation requiring companies to disclose their owners? Is Mongolia better positioned to succeed given its political stability and the relatively recent addition of mining to its economy? And, perhaps most importantly, can mining companies and communities in Mongolia work to identify points of intersection between the needs of the two so that co-benefits can be pursued and shared value created?

Making a Difference: The EITI project in Mongolia

Jon Brasnett, MAAPPS // Jan 19, 2015

The EITI has been officially implemented in Mongolia since 2010 and has the potential to bring enormous structural, developmental and societal changes to the country. Unlike many other countries plagued with an abundance of natural resources, Mongolia is geographically situated between Russia and China, two major economic and political power houses who have the self-entitled capacity to exploit the resources of other nations. While other countries with natural resources have also suffered the “resource curse” and been exploited by powerful and resource-hungry nations, many of them are geographically located far away from any major power so that the terms of extraction might be negotiated more in the favour of the country being exploited. Because of Mongolia’s location, it is our duty as students of public policy, to ensure that the natural resources, all of which belong to the people of Mongolia, are extracted sustainably and without harming any Mongolians, with the added benefit of increased social service provision by the government through proper taxation of the mining industry.

Wealthy countries seem to have this idea that their people have grown accustomed to living with certain luxuries (cars, electricity, clean water, precious gems) and therefore deserve to have continued access to these luxuries. For the governments of these countries, this means that they are willing to cut corners in less developed countries to maximize their extraction of these resources, even if cutting corners means allowing for less development and less access to basic necessities for the people of the countries they exploit. In the case of Mongolia, as we see in the Asia Pacific Memo video on EITI implementation there, many of its citizens have been negatively affected by the mining industry. Some nomadic pastoralists have been forced to relocate their herds and homes, other citizens have gone on without living without access to clean water, electricity, education or health services, and those Mongolians who have been given jobs in mines have been forced to sign wavers which remove any blame from the mining company in the event of their deaths on the job. This treatment is unfair, inhumane, and absolutely unacceptable for developed countries who claim to uphold the UN declaration of human rights.

In this light, I am looking forward to researching the EITI implementation in Mongolia and other countries to see what kind of progress has taken place in recent years. I hope to be able to influence policy in Mongolia, along with my colleagues, to improve the transparency of these companies and the government mining department to ensure that all the money is accounted for. This money can, in turn, go towards funding social services for Mongolian citizens to provide necessities such as clean drinking water, housing, food, as well as important developmental infrastructure such as roads, hospitals, schools and the like. With these improvements to Mongolian society and state, this resource-rich country can make huge strides in their developmental goals and come more in line with other developed countries.

Geopolitical and Geo-Economic Landscapes Canada-Mongolia

Bérangère Maïa Parizeau, MAAPPS // Jan 18, 2015

I find the unique dynamics between NGOs, different levels of government, other agencies and the public to be fascinating. EITI is a Norwegian NGO registered under the name of The Association for Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative” or “EITI Association” which operates globally.

(Important link: to see all EITI Reports, go to data.eiti.org)

EITI is a great example of this dynamic policy-making process. The EITI operates as an official mediator for transparency and national public accountability in extractive sectors globally. The United States applies EITI standards and has passed a measure for companies registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission to disclose how much they pay for natural resources access under the Section 1504 of the Dodd-Frank Act. The Dodd-Frank financial reform is considered a landmark legislation. The countries of Nigeria and Liberia have EITI standards legislations. In Norway, Ghana and Sierra Leone, mining and petroleum extraction laws include EITI criterions. Why is Canada not a EITI member?

EITI in Canada would contribute to Canadian public debate on natural resource accountability. Considering that Canada has been referred to as the country with the worst environmental performance in the western world, in my opinion this is worrisome. China is not a EITI member. The United States is a member. I’d like to find out why Canada is not a EITI member.

For information on Canada’s embarrassing environmental performance please visit: http://oilsandsrealitycheck.org/facts/climate-5/

As a reference, the above website was brought to my attention by Dr Tzepora Berman, who received an honorary law PhD degree from UBC. Tzeporah is known for her work as the coordinator of one of the largest civil disobedience in Canada’s history, the logging blockades in Clayoquot Sound during which she was arrested and charged with 857 counts of criminal aiding and abetting. Tzeporah was one of the creators and lead negotiators of the Great Bear Rainforest campaign as well as the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement. Her work has contributed to the protection of over 40 million hectares of old growth forests.

On the Importance of Self-Reflection in an Experiential Learning Project

Julian Dierkes // Jan 14, 2015

In the current iteration of the Asia Pacific Policy Project, we’re asking participants to regularly reflect on their experience on this blog. They will be sharing information and concrete lessons that they’ve learned, but we will also be encouraging them to reflect on the experience of an experiential learning project of this kind.

Since the Project is more of a structure in which learning occurs than a course in which the instructors (Dirk van Zyl, UBC Mining Engineering and myself) teach, such reflections are especially important for student to understand and realize the learning that they are doing. We know from many conversations with participants in previous Projects that the experience of an applied, problem-driven, teamwork-based project of this kind has been very valuable and that they have learned a lot about themselves, the nature of teamwork, the open-endedness and indeterminacy of policy-making , and about the subject matter that projects have covered. By reflecting more explicitly about such lessons, we are hoping that students will be focused even more on their learning and view their participation in the Project as an opportunity for the acquisition of policy-analysis, but also project management skills that will be useful to them in professional careers.

We are expecting all participants to post to this blog at least six times over the course of the Spring 2015 term (Jan-April). Obviously, more frequent posts will also be welcome. These posts are written for three different audiences: students themselves (reflection for learning), other participants (information), and the interested public (reflections and information). They will not be edited, but we will try to build up a categorization structure that will allow readers to navigate within posts. Posts will be identified by their author.

Obviously, posts will be of varying length, from brief two-paragraph descriptions of a reflective moment of discovery to a much more extended and more substantive discussion of a specific aspect of the localization of the EITI in Mongolia or elsewhere.

Some students are likely to also include their posts in other social media activities that will allow them to incorporate participation in the project into the construction of a portfolio with an eye toward their future careers.

The Continuation of an Asia Pacific Policy Project

Julian Dierkes // Jan 13, 2015

The Spring 2015 project will be the first time that we’ll be continuing an Asia Pacific Policy Project from a previous (academic) year and I’m very curious to see whether that will make a difference to how the project unfolds.

In Spring 2014 the project initially familiarized itself with EITI reconciliation reports to then delve deeper into how these reports could be communicated in a different/additional way to receive more attention in civil society and in Mongolia overall. One of the great successes of this project were the three presentations students gave in Ulaanbaatar in early June to the Ministry of Mining, to NGOs (facilitated and hosted by the EITI Secretariat) and to the Mongolian University of Science and Technology. These presentations showcased the project to Mongolian audiences and will allow us to build on a familiarity with our Project in the current iteration.

While we’re still waiting on a decision about some funding for the Project that will allow participants to travel to Mongolia and thus engage stakeholders even more directly, the fact that some connections around the topic of the EITI in Mongolia have been established already will likely make a big difference this Spring. It also raised the expectations, internally as well as externally.

As we’re focusing on structures and initiatives to create local engagement with the EITI as well as support for reporting at the local level, we are taking the Project in a somewhat different direction. Local-level reporting is new to EITI reporting in Mongolia and elsewhere, so we may find that we’ll have fewer international examples of activities to draw on than we did last year in a focus on communications. But, that means that there is significant room for students’ creativity in imagining or recommending solutions and initiatives.