Abstract
The Fiji government perceived mining as a means to accelerate economic growth because of its potential to generate great wealth for the Fijian economy. However, the environmental and social impacts associated with mining is of great concern. Mining activities have caused immense environmental degradations that affect livelihoods. One way to recompense these mining impacts is to provide a source of income to the landowners that can substitute the providence of natural resources that were damaged or completely taken away by mining activities. From the current revenue earned from mining, only land leases have been paid out to landowners and no royalty payments as yet, because there are no specific guidelines to determine the distributions. These have brought about the great need to determine the fair share of mineral royalties between the Fiji Government and the landowners in Fiji. This paper will therefore explicate the formation of coalitions based on similarities in policy beliefs, the various strategies undertaken to interact and network with each coalition in efforts to advocate core policy beliefs to obtain government’s attention for the formulation of Fiji’s Mineral Royalty Policy, based on the analytical lenses of Advocacy Coalition Framework and Issue Network Theory, at both the problem definition and agenda setting stages. Moreover, this paper also investigates the impacts of political instability in formulating Fiji’s first ever Mineral Royalty Policy.
Highlights
The structure and the rates of mineral royalties vary in different countries; the reason to collect mineral royalties is to repay the mineral resources owners for the extraction of minerals from the land and the royalty entitlement has become more complex over the years because of mineral rights and ownerships [1]
The Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) is a framework of the policy process formulated by Sabatier [8] to address “wicked” problems those that involves with conflicting goals, disputable critical technical issues, and numerous actors from different government levels [9]
This research was carried out using a qualitative approach and document analysis in order to i) determine diverse and competing values, interests, and norms held by multiple stakeholders in the case and ii) categorize these participants into several identifiable advocacy coalitions based on the distinct belief systems and solidarities observed in the dynamics of multiple types of interactions or relationships within each group and among the groups [12,24,25], as described in Sections 5 and 6
Summary
The structure and the rates of mineral royalties vary in different countries; the reason to collect mineral royalties is to repay the mineral resources owners for the extraction of minerals from the land and the royalty entitlement has become more complex over the years because of mineral rights and ownerships [1]. Due to the complexity of mineral rights ownership and the issue of appropriate mineral royalty entitlements, determining the fair share of mineral royalties between the Fiji government and the resource owners is most imperative This is to be achieved through the formulation of Fiji’s Mineral Royalty Policy (FMRP). As explained by Portz [2], defining a problem is very important in the initial stage of the policy process, because the definition of a problem will determine the type of policy tool that should be used to effectively address the problem In this case, the Indigenous Coalition have defined FMRP elements from a livelihood perspective, the Environmentalist Coalition from an environmental conservation and sustainability perspective, and lastly, the Business Coalition from an economic perspective. The developed research questions with the chosen, constructed conceptual framework will reduce the existing gaps in academic and policy literature
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