Can the EU stop forest fires in Indonesia? A holistic sustainability approach to studying the complex environmental challenges of the palm oil industry

By Tine Strand Thomsen, Rukhsar Asif and Maria Figueroa*

ABSTRACT PENDING



Presentation 2

Negotiating Human Rights: The rise of civil society and the Letpadaung copper mine in Myanmar

By Verena Girschik* (CBS), Htwe Htwe Thein (Curtin University) and Jasper Hotho (CBS)

Current debates around business and development have acknowledged that extractive industries pose particular challenges as extractive MNEs often exploit the weak governance in their host countries: in the worst case, they export the majority of resources and benefits to their home countries while leaving disastrous environmental footprints, violating human rights, and devastating the local communities in which their operations are located. Such worst case scenarios are often allowed to play out when a country lacks well-functioning institutional frameworks and when public and private domains are not well-separated. That is, when governments share an interest in the project, they often benefit from and are complicit in human rights violations committed in the pursuit of business. In this paper, we aim to enrich current debates on business and human rights by exploring how civil society may mobilize against and effectively threaten such ways of doing business. We conducted a case study of the contestation around the Letpadaung copper mine in Myanmar, a mega project financed by a Chinese state-owned conglomerate, and traced the rise of civil society as well as how business and government frame and shape the project over time to negotiate its continuation. In this first version of the paper, we share our preliminary findings.