Many companies miss out on significant benefits to their projects by not developing and implementing a stakeholder engagement management plan early enough in their project’s evolution.
With the exception of consultations completed to meet regulatory requirements for exploration permits and meetings requested by community leaders, it is common practice to delay stakeholder engagement until the initiation of the environmental assessment of a project. A plausible explanation for this is that stakeholder engagement falls outside of the expertise of the professionals driving the technical aspects of the project up to the feasibility stage. The consequence is that valuable stakeholder inputs are obtained late and are much more difficult to integrate into the design of the project.
Stakeholders are looking for the opportunity to provide input to the design of the project at all levels, but generally, this input is focused on environmental protection. As an example, it is not uncommon for stakeholder groups to have strong opinions on where effluent is discharged, based on existing uses of the environment. However, making a change of this magnitude to the project design at a late stage is difficult. It needs to be technically vetted and if the change is significant enough, it could delay and/or restart the regulatory process. The results are a reluctance to entertain change and a perception from stakeholders that their opinion isn’t really wanted.
The optimal time to initiate stakeholder engagement is at the completion of a project’s preliminary economic assessment (with positive results) so the engagement runs concurrently with the prefeasibility study. This start time allows for considering and possibly integrating stakeholder feedback into the project’s design. It allows ample time for relationships based on trust and respect to develop and it provides these communities with valuable time to develop strategies with and without the operator’s support – time to develop capacity that increases their ability to be ready to capitalise on future opportunities if the project proceeds to production.
