Development of a conceptual framework to evaluate factors that affect drivers for stakeholder engagement in mine waste management

Abstract

Investment in mining related projects is driven by the value that is placed upon the project by stakeholders. This value is a function of the perception or drivers that such stakeholders have of the mining project. The viewpoint a stakeholder has of a mining related project is a function of different factors and the combination of external influences that interact with an individual's motivating drives. Long standing debates such as the impacts on the economy and influence on the geopolitics on a local, national, regional and international scale are considered. As a result, the stakeholder viewpoint of the mining industry varies across different stakeholder groups. In the development of quantitatively based frameworks for informing discourse and providing decision support on mining related projects, it is useful to be able to capture these nuances in a way that enables clear evaluation of stakeholder perceptions/viewpoints/drivers. The VAT framework supported by it complementary tool developed in Microsoft Excel was proposed. The VAT Microsoft Excel tool forms the heart of the framework. It provides a means to combine different factors that affect stakeholders' perception of large-scale capital projects quantitatively. The VAT Microsoft Excel tool was developed in four steps, the identification of themes relating to viewpoints in mining related literature (1999–2019), identification of stakeholders and their expectations, definition of the determinants of value and their constituent elements and finally, the development of a quantitative Value Analysis Tree (VAT) framework Microsoft tool. The usefulness of the approach was illustrated using data and likely predictions of stakeholder responses based on four hypothetical company cases of a tailings reprocessing project. The approach is unique and provides a strong backbone for further use, for example in understanding decision making from the perspective of multiple stakeholders.