LatAm Local Community Risk Research

Four successive years of low resource prices (2013-17) led to mining project cancellations and a precipitous fall in royalties paid to national governments across Latin America. The royalty flow to local communities was all but cut off, infuriating the people who live closest to these large projects. Armed with cellphone cameras and coached by NGOs and others, local communities now interrupt much-needed but often poorly planned natural resource and infrastructure projects by legal, electoral and protest means.

Before investors back a project, they turn to AMI to assess local community risk by surveying local citizens as well as undertaking discreet interviews with key influencers in local communities from indigenous groups to local politicians, to NGOs, religious leaders, community leaders, union leaders, and even illegal miners and organized criminal groups. Understanding their gripes, and the financial and political motives of their opposition is crucial to helping our clients assess the true risk of their opposition and how said opposition might be overcome with the right project design and communication strategy.

For mining, energy and infrastructure operators already installed in their projects, local community risk requires discreet, low scale monthly monitoring in order to foresee and assess potential problems. Armed with timely information, AMI clients can proactively reach out to disgruntled groups and address their concerns. Also coordinating a local intelligence program with our client’s CSR, PR and Government relations budgets and focus is crucial to making those programs work.