Engagement and collaboration

Community engagement is what we do directly with the people affected by a specific activity. Collaboration is what we do with the other parties whose decisions bear on the same issues: national and regional government, other operators, civil society organisations, academic and technical institutions, and multi-stakeholder bodies. The two are complementary and neither substitutes for the other. In particular, collaboration with an institution that represents a community is not engagement with that community.

Several of the issues that arise around a mining activity are catchment-level or regional rather than site-level. Water availability in a shared catchment, road use and traffic on a shared route, regional labour supply and skills, and the cumulative effect of several activities on the same population are all issues on which a single operator's controls are insufficient by construction. Collaboration is the response, and the framework treats it as a control rather than as goodwill.

Peru implements the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, and our approach to transparency in dealings with government is written against the EITI's principles; we are not an EITI supporting company. Payments to government are made and recorded in accordance with applicable law, and the Tax Transparency Policy prohibits arrangements that lack commercial substance.

Political engagement is conducted under the Political Engagement Policy: lawful, transparent and consistent with our stated positions, and with political contributions made to obtain an advantage prohibited. Where we participate in an industry association, a position taken by that association which is inconsistent with our own is raised within the association rather than tolerated silently.

Where public security forces are present in support of an activity, the arrangements are conducted consistently with the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights. This sits here as well as under human rights because it is a collaboration with a public body whose conduct is not within our control, and the framework requires the terms of that collaboration to be established in advance rather than negotiated during an incident.

Where an activity generates them, counts of collaborations, memoranda and partnership arrangements are published. We record arrangements and the commitments arising from them in the commitments register.