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Accepted Paper:

"They meant no harm": the giving environment, corporate social responsibility and Kubo of Papua New Guinea  
Monica Minnegal (University of Melbourne) Peter Dwyer (University of Melbourne)

Paper short abstract:

Corporate Social Responsibility and a notion of environment as ‘giving’ underlaid the respective moral positions of company representatives and Kubo people when the latter hosted the exploratory ventures of the former. These disparate moral positions meant there was no ‘social commensuration’.

Paper long abstract:

Arrogance, complicity or resistance may often be read into the actions of actors on one or the other side of encounters between representatives of resource extraction companies and the local communities on whose lands they operate. Attempts to understand, or excuse, those actions as pragmatic and strategic endeavours are rarely sufficient, in that they ignore the moral dimensions of choice. The present case study explores moral imperatives that underlaid the encounter between companies associated with the Papua New Guinea Liquefied Natural Gas Project and Kubo people on whose lands they established a base camp. Those imperatives may be understood, on the one hand, as informed by the trope of Corporate Social Responsibility and on the other by the trope of the 'giving environment'. The former prioritized a rhetoric of 'progress', 'development' and 'helping the underprivileged' that ensured a sense of superior knowledge and superior social position in relations with Kubo people. The latter prioritized exclusion of Company from a social domain while continuing to affirm reciprocal relations through on-going exchanges with fellow Kubo. These profound differences in moral position meant that though the parties maintained cordial relations, and each achieved desired objectives, there was, ultimately, no 'social commensuration'. In the final analysis, Kubo people were positioned by the representatives of an ontological schema that was grounded in certainty and who (mis)understood other life worlds to be either inferior variants of their own or striving to participate in, and join, their own.

Panel Land01
Large-scale resource extraction projects and moral encounters
  Session 1