Grass roots and deep holes: community responses to mining in Melanesia

Imagine that a group of experts had been brought together in 1985 to dis-cuss how the mining sector could contribute to sustainable development in Melanesia. It is exceedingly unlikely that anyone at the meeting would have forecast the outbreak of the Bougainville rebellion in 1988 and the forced closure of the Panguna copper mine in 1989. It is quite unlikely that anyone would have foreseen the internationalization of debate about the environmental impact of the Ok Tedi mine, let alone the Australian litigation against Broken Hill Propriety Limited (bhp) as the mine’s oper-ator (Banks and Ballard 1997). Instead, the Papua New Guinea contingent at the meeting would probably have been congratulating themselves for having a mineral policy framework that was the envy of other develop-ing countries. They would have cited the mineral exploration boom of the mid-1980s as proof that they were on the right track; and they would probably have cited Bougainville Copper Limited’s training and localiza-tion program and Ok Tedi Mining Limited’s environmental monitoring program as examples of industry best practice. Policy makers from around the region would have nodded in agreement and undertaken to emulate this shining example. The articles in this issue are restricted to the Independent State of Papua New Guinea and the French Territory of New Caledonia, so we need to take some care in generalizing from these two cases to the political, social, and cultural significance of mining in “Melanesia. ” The Vatukoula gold mine in Fiji, which has been operating for several decades, makes a very small contribution to the national economy (only 2 percent of gros