Paper short abstract:

In the absence of a state mining companies will often reluctantly take it upon themselves to fulfill various development and service delivery roles in order to secure and maintain support for their projects. But should they be expected to fulfill those roles, and can they be trusted to do so?

Paper long abstract:

Frieda River Project is a resource extraction project in the making. The exploration work in the area has been ongoing since it began in 1969, bringing new people and introducing new ideas to this geographically remote corner of Papua New Guinea. For the local communities, these introductions marked a shift away from time of the ancestors and created a series of opportunities for new kinds of livelihoods. Social mapping exercises identified and named local communities as the project landowners, while the ownership of the mineral deposits remains with the PNG government. It is, however, the mining company that has the capacity to extract the minerals and turn Frieda's deposits into "development".

Based on my conversations with community, corporate and state actors involved in the process of planning for the Frieda River Mine, this paper looks at ways in which ideas of the state and state's responsibilities were negotiated and enacted in the project locality, and responses this elicited among the local communities. It shows how the government representatives refracted their responsibilities onto the corporate agents and how the company reluctantly took over the state's various development and service delivery roles in an attempt to secure and maintain governmental as well as local stakeholders' support for the project. Finally it discusses how the company used the rhetoric of Corporate Social Responsibility in an attempt to limit its liabilities and claim that the lack of state involvement at Frieda made many of the infrastructure and service delivery programmes inherently unsustainable.