Academic literature on the topic 'Copper mines and mining Papua New Guinea Bougainville Island'

This article focuses on the enigma of Catholic Marian revolutionary movements during the decade-long conflict on the island of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea at the end of the twentieth century. These religious movements embody the legacy of a colonial history as well as people’s responses to poorly monitored resource extraction, social and economic displacement, regional factionalism, and years of fighting by Bougainvilleans against the Papua New Guinea Defence Force. At the same time, the movements’ popularity throve on leaders’ reputations for their religious knowledge and their mobilization of people based on religious faith. During the conflict Bougainville came to be seen by many residents as holy land (Me’ekamui). According to Francis Ona’s Marian Mercy Mission and Peter Kira’s Our Lady of Mercy movements, the covenant land of Bougainville had to be safeguarded from Satan, represented by Papua New Guinea and an Australian copper mining company, in the freedom struggle conceived as a Marian holy war.

Bougainville is part of the North Solomons Province of Papua New Guinea and is located nearly 1,000 kilometres from Port Moresby (refer to maps on pages 3 and 4). In November 1988, a dispute at the Panguna copper mine on the island between landowner s and the owners of the mine, Bougainville Copper Limited (BCL), erupted into violence. The subsequent formation of the Bougainville Revolutionary Army and demands for secession led to the most serious political and economic problems facing Papua New Guinea (PNG) since independence was granted in 1975. In the four years since the initial trouble began, more than 1,500 people have been killed - in military conflict on the islands of Bougainville and Buka, and the mine, which until 1989 provided employment for 3,500 people, has closed.1 A blockade of Bougainville by Guinea Defence Force (PNGDF) resulted in shortages of food, fuel and the Papua New medical supplies to the island, the latter resulting in the deaths of 3,000 innocent civilians.2 Terence Wesley-Sm ith of the University of Hawaii writes, " Except for the independence struggle in Irian Jaya, no other conflict in the Pacific Islands region has produced this level of human suffering since World War 11.3 The Namaliu Government and the country's image abroad were weakened by allegations of human rights abuses and indiscipline amongst the security forces. The role of the Australian Government, largely through its training of military personnel and the supply of military hardware to the PNGDF, has also been placed under scrutiny by a Commonwealth parliamentary committee and human rights activists. The dispute has had a significant impact on the economy of the mainland. Closure of the mine resulted in the loss of approximately 40 per cent of export earnings for the country and 17 per cent of the Government's budget revenue. The blockade of Bougainville led to the loss of export earnings from cocoa (45 per cent of PNG's total cocoa production), copra (the province was the second highest producers of copra) and timber. The loss of national income from the mine and other cash crops forced the Government to announce in January 1990 a 10 per cent devaluation of the kina, cuts in government recurrent spending and a firmer line on wage increases.

As the scope and importance of the global economy expands, the international business arena presents continuous challenges in the governance of multinational enterprises (MNEs). Chief among these challenges is the management of the turbulent milieu in which world commerce is conducted and, as a result, academic inquiry into the environmental dimensions of international management has increased. The focus of this academic attention however, has been primarily concerned with MNEs from developed countries (DCs) which establish operations in other industrialised economies. In relative terms, there has been insufficient research into DC based organisations involved in less developed countries (LDCs). This dearth of inquiry is particularly evident in the rapidly expanding island economies of the South-west Pacific. Accordingly, the aim of this thesis is to extend current understanding of international management in the volatile and diverse context of LDCs. To this end, the management of Bougainville Copper Limited (BCL), an Australian mining company which operated in Papua New Guinea's North Solomons Province, was investigated. Using a single case study approach, inductive and deductive processes were applied in order to comprehend the reality of BCL's complex relationship with its host country and host society. Extant literature formed the conceptual framework of the study, from which the central and subordinate research questions were framed. Primary data were gathered from interviews with past executives of BCL, with secondary material assembled from company documents, published histories, news articles, PNG and Australian government reports and prior studies of Bougainville. A broad verification process was instituted to ensure the rigour of the data and the interpretive process which followed. The research findings support claims in the literature that corporate performance is dependent upon the close alignment of elements within the internal and external environments of MNEs. However, it was determined that alignment becomes increasingly difficult as the business climate in the host setting deviates from that in the home country, and MNE activities cannot be sustained under extremely divergent home-host conditions despite management's efforts to control external and organisation-specific variables. It was further established that MNE management should focus environmental congruency on the host · society, rather than on the host country as suggested in the literature. Evidence from the research reveals that the immediate population is the most influential contextual factor for MNEs, particularly in LDCs of the South-west Pacific which are typified by ethnic identity and local attachments which take precedence over the abstract notion of nationhood. The outcomes of this thesis present a range of implications concerning the management of MNEs in LDCs in terms of policy development, management practice and theory development, as well as suggesting possibilities for further research in the subject field.