Mining, Social Change and Corporate Social Responsibility: Drawing lines in the Papua New Guinea mud

Abstract

The Pacific Islands have been the focus of international academic and policy ‘concern’ in the past decade. Much of this has centred on the issue of governance, with examples such as PNG, Fiji and the Solomon Islands used to support arguments of state failures and a regional crisis of governance (see, for example, Larmour 1998; Hughes 2004). There is a tendency to see ‘state failure’ in these cases as an internal issue (that is, due to internal problems of governance), although this is obviously questioned by the prevalence of the problem across the region. Indeed it is surprising how little