Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates the role of community leaders in the process of planning for a large scale resource extraction project at Frieda River, PNG, and puts to the test a series of assumptions about the nature of stakeholder relations at mining developments operating in indigenous territories.

Paper long abstract:

The Frieda River Project is one of the most contested proposed mining developments in the Pacific region. The exploration work in the area has been ongoing since it began in 1969, bringing together unlikely partners in a process of planning for a large-scale gold and copper mine. Although in a conventional sense the mine at Frieda does not yet exist, over the past forty-five years it has emerged as a productive social site through which relations are formed and negotiated, and through which the efficacy of those relations is assessed. Taking the stakeholders' shared expectation of a mine at Frieda as a starting point, this paper describes the process of turning the area's rich mineral deposits into "development" as an inherently relational quest. It looks at the role of community leaders in the planning and preparing for the Frieda River Mine, and uses their own words and narratives to describe how the leaders themselves conceive of their positions, alliances and responsibilities. The paper argues that the type of rhetoric which places them in a disputed space of dealing with conflicting cultural logics should also be applied to state and corporate representatives involved in the process of negotiating stakeholder relations at Frieda. It presents some of the ways in which Frieda's Impact Communities tried to embrace the seemingly foreign concepts and practices of the mining industry, and uses those to assess the claim of the incompatibility of cultural worlds brought together by the promise of mining development at the Frieda River.