Ignorance as strategy: ‘Shadow places’ and the social impacts of the ranger uranium mine

Lawrence, Rebecca; O’Faircheallaigh, Ciaran

doi:10.1016/j.eiar.2021.106723

Cited by 16 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…As the normative terrain pushes the UNGPs' "know and show" principle, there is ongoing resistance by mining companies to know and show anything much at all. In a study of Rio Tinto's Ranger uranium mine in Australia's Northern Territory, Lawrence & O'Faircheallaigh (2022) describe how, over a period of almost four decades, the company avoided formalising organisational knowledge of social and environmental impacts. This "production of ignorance" has served to prevent the Mirarr traditional owners from progressing their claims against the company.…”

Section: Messy Landscapes and Illegibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Corporate Responses to Community Grievance: Voluntarism and Pathologies of Practice

Owen

Kemp

2023

J Bus Ethics

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Grievance landscapes form in rapidly industrialising contexts where social and environmental impacts are inevitable. This paper focuses on the complex operational and organisational settings in which grievances arise and the industrial pathologies that form around resource development projects. The arguments draw on classic and contemporary literature on “grievance”, “right” and “entitlement”, and the authors’ own sustained engagement with global mining companies and local communities. Our contention is that the grievance landscape is far more critical to understanding environmental, human rights, and mining interactions than the managerial systems that companies construct to signal compliance with voluntary international norms. These managerial systems, or operational-level grievance mechanisms, map the procedural contours of how a local grievance would travel once it is made visible to the company. In practice, however, it is fiction, illegibility and invisibility that dominate. Across the pathologies, the common denominator is the corporate propensity to avoid recognising the legitimacy of a local grievance and the source of its cause.

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Section: Messy Landscapes and Illegibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Corporate Responses to Community Grievance: Voluntarism and Pathologies of Practice

Owen

Kemp

2023

J Bus Ethics

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“…Instead, the decision-makers amplified the negative impacts of development on those communities by fostering new industries to use the new fisheries resources in the reservoirs and thus created a health catastrophe (Rosenberg et al, 1995). Across the globe in Australia, approval of the Ranger Uranium Mine was anticipated to bring opportunities for economic success to Aboriginal people of the Kakadu region, but a succession of social impact studies confirmed the failure of the mine and related changes in environmental management, tourism and town planning to address the region’s Indigenous custodians’ concerns (Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1984; Collins, 2000; Dodson et al, 1997; Katona, 2006; Lawrence, 2021; Lawrence and O’Faircheallaigh, 2022; Levitus and Aboriginal Project Committee, 1997).…”

Section: Why Sia?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Reconnecting to the social: Ontological foundations for a repurposed and rescaled SIA

Howitt,

Jolly

2023

Current Sociology

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Social Impact Assessment’s incorporation into neoliberal management systems did not enhance their capacity to actually respond to social impacts. Efforts to integrate ‘social’ and ‘environmental’ assessments largely assumed that Social Impact Assessment rightfully belonged to key practitioners (professionals, academics, and corporate and government decision-makers). This article advocates rethinking ontological foundations for a different sort of Social Impact Assessment. It starts from an understanding that the social domain is always and inescapably connected across scales from the microbial, through the global to the cosmological. Building from experience working with Indigenous peoples, it recognizes that although ontological separation of social, environmental and other categories of impact assessment may well facilitate project approval, it also renders industrial systems deaf and blind to many of the most pressing risks facing coupled human and natural systems at multiple scales.

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“…In contrast, discourse that recognises these risks contains a plethora of harmful contingent elements that expose companies to the potential for additional costs and forward liability. Put simply, companies actively pursue measures of denial and ignorance to buffer themselves from the claim that they had an opportunity to act responsibly (Lawrence & O'Faircheallaigh, 2022). Crisis events that expose companies for negative impacts and associated harms are easily outlived by the practices that created them.…”

Section: Risk Avoidance and Non-disruptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Corporate social irresponsibility, hostile organisations and global resource extraction

Kemp

Owen

2022

Corp Soc Responsibility Env

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Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a fundamentally normative construction. It speaks to what social responsibility should look like, who it should apply to, and how it should be demonstrated. By contrast, the analytic position of the corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) discourse is evidence-based, and objects to the notion that companies can claim to be responsible while at the same time act irresponsibly. This paper supports a clear separation between (i) the critique of company performance within the dominant discursive construct of CSR and (ii) CSI as an evidence-based approach to reading and documenting corporate performance. A conceptually distinct CSI discourse removes the need for researchers to disprove CSR rhetoric before engaging with responsibility problems. Rather than organising studies around CSR claims and commitments, we suggest that researchers of global resource extraction put their energies towards capturing the form and function of 'organised irresponsibility' in locations where mining takes place.

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Ignorance as strategy: ‘Shadow places’ and the social impacts of the ranger uranium mine

Cited by 16 publications

References 16 publications

Corporate Responses to Community Grievance: Voluntarism and Pathologies of Practice

Corporate Responses to Community Grievance: Voluntarism and Pathologies of Practice

Reconnecting to the social: Ontological foundations for a repurposed and rescaled SIA

Corporate social irresponsibility, hostile organisations and global resource extraction

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