BCS News
Strengthening Civil Society Capacities to Negotiate with Multinational Companies in the Extractive Industries: BCS seeks to maximize community benefits from extractive industries
“Our experience with corporate-community relationships in the extractive industries demonstrates a few key lessons. Most importantly, a strong civil society and a capacity in host communities to negotiate with companies from a position of strength are crucial to sustainable local development. This is how communities and companies find win-win solutions. This project allows BCS to apply its expertise in strengthening the community side of corporate-community relationships.” A. Rani Parker, Business-Community Synergies President and Founder.
BCS (Business-Community Synergies), in partnership with the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) Centre for Environmental Policy and Governance, has begun a new project focusing on the community impacts of resource extraction. The three year project will implement a community-company assessment training programme to enable host communities to better negotiate for net benefits from corporate operations.
Project Phase One: Local capacity building
The project will leverage BCS’s extensive experience in working with NGOs and in community-company engagement with LSE’s Sustainability Fellowship programme to test the training programme at five global sites. At each of the five sites, a team combining project, corporate and local representation will assess existing community-company relationships and deliver a training program that strengthens host community capacity to negotiate with companies on behalf of local interests and priorities.
BCS will share community-company practices and lessons learned so that NGO and community stakeholders can develop strategies and plans to engage with companies operating in their areas. Implementation of the training will be followed by publication of case studies for each site as well as a cross-country-analysis.
Project Phase Two: International results sharing
In addition, LSE will host an international conference for communities, NGOs and companies to share experiences using the strategies generated from the community-company assessment training programme. This event will disseminate the project’s research results and enable academics and practitioners to present relevant experiences.
James Van Alstine, LSE fellow and grant leader says: "We are excited to develop and take forward new ideas and tools about multidirectional accountability at the site of resource extraction. In order to maximise local sustainable development benefits, it is important for communities to share in planning and monitoring throughout the lifecycle of extractive industry projects."
For more information, contact:
A. Rani Parker, RParker@BCSynergies.com
James Van Alstine, J.Van-Alstine@lse.ac.uk
To download a copy of this press release as a PDF, click here.