Mining Projects and Communities: A Comparative Analysis Case Study

This case study provides a comparative analysis of Evolution Mining Limited and Barrick Gold Corporation, focusing on their relationships with host communities. It examines the size and scope of their mining projects, the characteristics of the surrounding communities, and the nature of the interactions between the companies and the residents. The analysis includes a review of community projects implemented by each company, the level of community involvement, and evaluations of these projects' effectiveness. Furthermore, the study outlines the organizational structure of each company's community relations efforts, highlighting the presence of executive-level staff and dedicated teams. The case study also addresses instances of community outrage and the mechanisms each company has in place to manage grievances and ensure positive community relations, ultimately comparing their approaches to stakeholder engagement and corporate social responsibility.

Running head: MINING AND COMMUNITIES
Mining And Communities
Name
Affiliate Institution

MINING AND COMMUNITIES 2
Evolution Mining Limited
One of the biggest mining companies in Australia is the Evolution mining company. The company was
started in 2011 through the merger of Catalpa Resources limited and Conquest Mining limited. Following that
merger, the company has been through a spree of acquisitions that help it grow dynamically. First was the
acquisition of Newcrest Mining, and through this acquisition, the company gained the mining interests in the
Cracow and Mt Rawdon mines. Then it went ahead to the acquisition of Cowal and Mungari in July and August
2015 respectively, these acquisitions were reported in their full year report of 2018. Australia is one of the few
countries on the planet that has a vast deposit of mineral, both precious metal and crude oil. These large deposits
create an avenue for the spring up of several mining companies since there is plenty of space for everyone. It is
these companies that have enabled the unstoppable growth of Evolution Mining. The company itself has a
reputation for reliability and consistency even though they have been in business for only a short while. It has
managed to keep a reliable track of consistent achievement of production and cash cost guidance, They even
managed to win the NSW Mining Safety Excellence Award in 2017.
The main products of Evolution Mining are gold and copper. They operate major mines in Cowal, South
Wales; Mt Carlton, Mt Rawdon, and Cracow, all in Queensland; and Mungari in Western Australia. These
projects are currently running although the company also has economic interests in sites such as Ernest Henry in
Queensland. These projects deliver 100% of the gold, 30% of the copper and silver the company deals in. The
Ernest project is set to deliver 49% of gold, copper, and silver in the future. The size of the company is
determined by the size of projects it undertakes, in the financial year ended 2018, the company had produced a
total of 801,187 ounces of gold which sold at A$797 per ounce. And for the financial year 2019, they have a
projected production of 720,000 to 770,000 ounces that will cost between A$850 - A$900 per ounce of gold. It is
numbers like these that prove their reliability in production and cost guidance (Evolution Mining Ltd Investor
Day, 2017).

MINING AND COMMUNITIES 3
The company also doesn't hold back when it comes to community management. In fact, they came in as
runners-up for the Community Excellence Award of 2017. A brief description of the communities that surround
them would be that those communities are rural and away from any major cities. Evolution Mining prides itself
in being at the forefront of community outreach and even has stated in their website that their number one goal is
to have the communities at a better state for the simple reason of their existence in that particular area. They say,
according to Mactaggart et al., (2017), their desire is to leave a positive legacy. They have a community relations
policy and community principles that they use when they are integrating into a new community.
Given that the communities within which they operate are rural, they have tailored they interaction
procedures and guidelines to tend directly to that community. Like Bond, Barclay, and Pattenden (2013) state,
Evolution Mining has helped most of the communities that they operate within in different ways; local
sponsorship, for example, the Cowal sponsorship programme; donations and partnerships, training,
apprenticeship and scholarships, local employment and procurements. The company even formed a local emergy
response team to cater to emergencies like accidents or incidents. The company has also helped with education
in the areas they operate, for example, they partnered with Coolgardie Primary School to build a new sensory
play are and bush tucker garden both of which has greatly helped increase pupil's engagement. They also strive
to empower the youth through programmes like the WA Department of Sport & Recreation programme and The
Shire of Coolgardie, which along with the police, help hinder petty crimes and fight anti-social behavior
(Hongtao et al., 2017).
The company has formed a community outreach team which can be contacted at any time. This team is
comprised of select members of the communities that the company is operating. The main duties of this team are
to take feedback from the community about how the company is performing in regards to the community
standards; they also welcome any suggestions on areas they can improve upon to better serve the community.
The progress made by the company is reported in an annual community report that is released alongside the
annual financial report. One can confidently say that Evolution Mining cares for all the communities within
which they operate. In fact, the management tactics of Evolution Mining is so good that almost no community

MINING AND COMMUNITIES 4
outrage has been reported from any of the communities they operate in within Australia. It is also worth
mentioning that Evolution Mining annually reports on their extended attempts to secure the environment in the
places they operate. Safety of the environment is very important to that.
Barrick Gold Corporation
Another highly comparable company is Barrick Gold Corporation. This is a company that approaches
things differently, they view everyone, including their employees as shareholders and members of the company
that has a take in it. The organization was started in Canada in 1983 and employs over 11000 people worldwide.
They have running operations in over 10 countries including Australia and Tanzania (Newenham-Kahindi,
2011). It is different from Evolution Mining in that more than 75% of their gold comes from the United States
and Canada. But they have mining operations in Australia too. With their international status, they are a big
company, their reserves for gold and copper is almost immeasurable; In the Barrick Gold Corp Annual
Shareholders Meeting of 2017, the following numbers were given; 64.4 million ounces of proven and probable
gold which is on top of 88.6 million ounces of measured and indicated gold reserves. They also have 8.1 billion
pounds of proven and probable copper reserves and 7.3 billion pounds of measured and indicated reserves of
copper. In 2017, they produced a total of 53 million ounces of gold and 413 million pounds of copper, they had
net earnings of 1.4 billion USD for the sales of gold. In Australia, their biggest mining site is in Kalgoorlie. The
site produced a total of 368,000 ounces of gold which sold for $806 per ounce in the financial year 2017. The
site also mines copper; it produced a total of 3,858 pounds of copper in the financial year 2017.
Doohan (2007) write that it is true that mining can benefit the local government in many ways, in their
community policy programme, Barrick corporation states that their ability effectively operates depend on them
properly managing community relations. Some of the benefits the company state as coming from mining are
improved economic activity, job creation, and development of infrastructure. As well, mining can improve the
social status of a community. It is a strong belief at Barrick that developing a strong relationship with host
communities is about getting the small things right. The organization achieves this by managing their impacts,

MINING AND COMMUNITIES 5
for example, noise, traffic, and infrastructure, sharing with the community the advantages of mining and
showing respect to the community (Goswami, 2015).
The corporation has set up a Community Relations Management System (CRMS)that is made up of different
components; a Community Relations(CR) Policy, a CR standard, and supporting procedures. The community
relations management system provides guidelines for operations of Barrick Corporations at their sites (Barrick
Gold Corporation, 2014).
The value of community relations is so important to the organization that in 2017 they revised their
CRMS to better suit the company sustainability vision. In their new CRMS,Kirschke (2014) discusses, they
introduced a scoreboard that ranks the different levels of satisfaction in communities. The score is determined by
the level of community support.
After the introduction of the scoreboard, different sites conducted a survey to gauge community support.
The main purpose of this technique is to provide a means to measure the progress in sites.
CRMS determines and gives a guideline of how the site will establish itself in a specific region, it, therefore,
helps the organization determine if there are communities that have to be treated in a different more specific way,
for example, how well is the safety of the community, are there any indigenous people, how does the
organisation deal with acquisitions and resettlement (PR Newswire, 2011).
The CRMS is broad, one section of it is the community engagement; it requires the member of the
organization to engage the community consistently, transparently and comprehensively in all the locations. And
given that the CRMS is not strict, it can be bent to accommodate unforeseen problems with community relations.
In the eyes of the company, the community is a stakeholder in the mine, and since it is company policy that
stakeholders are informed promptly of any developments, the CRMS also requires that the community is
informed of any progress or change in the site, which may include plans to migrate the mining site writes
Strange et al. (2017).

MINING AND COMMUNITIES 6
Triscritti (2013) states, CRMS helps the organization and the community build a strong relationship by
issuing guidance and means for engagement in best practices, issuing the goals of the organizations and a way to
confirm and measure the effectiveness of their efforts.
For a company as big as Barrick Corporation, community outrages or incidents of an outrage cannot
miss, as a matter of fact, the organization has had more than a few incidents; in 2017 in Peru, the local
community at one of their sites blocked the closure of their site claiming problem with the water supply. They
claimed that the site was taking all the water and therefore the community was left without water.
The organization has also had environmental issues, in March 2018, a pipe in Veladero Argentina,
ruptured causing an environmental disaster (Metals & Mining Industry Profile: Argentina, 2018). This led to a
protest by an environmental group. The organization managed to contain the rupture with the site but later on
apologized for the incident.
With the emergence of all these grievances, the organization has set up a grievances system that seeks to
receive and settle as many grievances as possible with the shortest time possible. The local community, through
this system, is able to report all problems directly to Barrick officials so that they can be solved. The
organization has put in place a compulsory policy that complaints have to be handled. The complaints go
through the executive director and the general manager an has to be viewed by the stakeholders (women and
vulnerable people).
A 2017 statistic shows that in that year 259 complaints were submitted and out of those 244 were
resolved, which included complaints from the previous year. The organization has implemented a mechanism to
measure the success of a site, they do so by checking the number of grievances solved and how quick they were
solved. The organization also logs the number of grievances submitted to a site and in that way they are able to
judge how well the site is doing in terms of community relations. Through these grievances, the organization
knows how to hire, resettle and compensate the local community. The satisfaction of everyone involved is
dependent on the cooperation of both parties.

MINING AND COMMUNITIES 7
Comparison
A major part of this analysis is the comparison of the two companies. According to me, they are the same
just operating on a different scale and size. Barrick Corporation is a multinational organization and has managed
to survive for a long time based on its good community relations programme, it has engaged the communities in
their operations treating them as a part of the organization itself, this kind of approach makes the operations of
the business smooth and effortless. What helps their operations, even more, is the grievance system put in place
to deal with any issues present. Evolution Mining operates along the same lines, they value the cooperation of
the local community although they have no grievance system. Both companies help these local communities
extensively and depend on them for employment. In conclusion, this analysis has determined that both
organizations shave the same operations and similar community outreach and relations programmes.
References
Newenham-Kahindi, A. (2011). A Global Mining Corporation and Local Communities in the Lake Victoria
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Strange, C., Bremner, A., Fisher, C., Howat, P., & Wood, L. (2017). Local community playgroup participation
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