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UCLA Researchers Evaluate Efforts to Curb Trade of Conflict Minerals Report finds ‘meaningful progress’ over past decade, but issues including child labor violations persist

By Stan Paul

Over the past decade, the U.S. and other nations have implemented programs intended to monitor and mitigate human rights abuses and armed conflict related to mining operations around the world.

A new report co-authored by UCLA researchers has found that those so-called due diligence programs have fostered “meaningful progress” in the Democratic Republic of Congo, one of the countries targeted by the initiatives. But child labor and other violations are still taking place.

Tin, tantalum and tungsten are commonly used in computers and cell phones and a wide array of other electronics. In some countries like the DRC, those materials are designated as “conflict minerals” because the areas in which they’re mined are affected by armed violence — and in some cases, the violence is related to mining operations.

Researchers collected data in 2019 from 104 mine sites, as well as 1,054 households and 1,000 people living in villages around those mine sites, in the provinces of South Kivu and Maniema. They found that areas with due diligence programs see less interference by the armed forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Compared to areas without due diligence programs, more than 50% fewer mines in areas served by due diligence programs reported a military presence or improper taxation by soldiers.

The study also found that, in villages near the mines served by those programs, the number of households reporting a military presence was 27% lower than in villages without the programs.

However, the analysis also revealed that mines in the areas covered by the diligence programs do not have significantly lower rates of child labor than those outside of the programs’ purview. Some child labor was reported at roughly one-third of mines, whether they were covered by the programs or not.

“We uncovered reasons to applaud these programs, but also room for improvement, particularly with respect to child labor,” said Darin Christensen, co-author of the study and an assistant professor of public policy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. “Unsurprisingly, the due diligence program is not a panacea — it reduces important risks associated with mining in the eastern Congo but does not eradicate all harms.

“In better isolating its impacts, we hope to clarify where further efforts are needed to promote sustainable livelihoods and human security in mining regions.”

Christensen is the co-founder (with UCLA professors Graeme Blair and Michael Ross) of the UCLA-based Project on Resources and Governance, which led the study’s research design and analysis. The report’s other contributors are the International Peace Information Service, a Belgian research institute; Sub-Saharan Field Research & Consulting Services, a Kenyan research agency; and Ulula, a Canadian software and analytics provider.

International efforts to mitigate or eliminate the negative impacts of conflict minerals have focused on keeping the minerals out of global supply chains. The aim is to break the link between mining and conflict by identifying and boycotting suppliers who contribute, willingly or unwillingly, to armed groups or human rights abuses, according to the report.

This strategy is reflected in regulatory efforts such as the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act in the U.S. and the European Union’s more recent Regulation on Conflict Minerals. Those policies require U.S. and European companies that source certain minerals from conflict-affected areas, like eastern Congo, to conduct due diligence around the production and processing of minerals to verify that suppliers respect human rights and do not contribute to conflict.

But more than a decade after Dodd-Frank, there had been scant research on whether due diligence programs are improving economic and security conditions.

The report also found that areas covered by due diligence programs report a greater presence of government regulators.

Researchers found that the proportion of households reporting tax collection and services provided by the government regulators who are responsible for monitoring the mining sector was 58% higher in areas served by the programs than in those that aren’t. However, when households were asked whether they felt secure, there was no statistical difference in responses between those in areas served by the program and those that were not.

View an animation about this study

Tackling the Resource Curse UCLA researchers launch the Project on Resources, Development, and Governance to design policies in countries where corruption, conflict undercut natural abundance

By George Foulsham

From left, Michael Ross, professor of political science; Graeme Blair, assistant professor of political science; and Darin Christensen, assistant professor of public policy at UCLA Luskin, are the co-founders of PRDG. Photo by George Foulsham

For three UCLA scholars, it just didn’t add up. Why do so many people who live in developing countries with an abundance of natural resources struggle in poverty every day?

“You would think that it’s a simple thing to take wealth that’s underneath the ground and turn it into wealth on top of the ground for everybody to share,” said Michael Ross, a professor of political science at UCLA. “But we know from studying countries around the world that that very rarely happens.”

Social scientists call it the resource curse, and it’s one of the reasons why Ross and two UCLA colleagues, UCLA Luskin’s Darin Christensen and political science faculty member Graeme Blair, have created the Project on Resources, Development, and Governance (PRDG), a network of social scientists, policymakers, nongovernmental organizations and industry representatives dedicated to finding policies that promote welfare, peace and accountability in resource-rich countries.

“For the past 15 years or so, I have been living in two worlds,” Ross said. “One is an academic world where I do research and I speak to some of the smartest young social scientists in the world who are studying the problems of developing countries. In the other world, I’m sitting around the table with policymakers who are worried about how to fix a problem called the resource curse.”

About three dozen countries in the low- and middle-income world are economically dependent on oil, gas and mining, but they all seem to struggle despite the riches provided by the resources. Those countries include Angola, Kenya, Uganda, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia, Indonesia, East Timor and Kazakhstan.

“They tend to be conflict-ridden,” Ross said. “There are protests, there’s pollution, there are civil wars around these projects.” There’s also plenty of corruption, with many of the countries in economic turmoil because of bribery and other issues in regions of exceptional resource wealth, such as mining areas.

“There are so many opportunities for corruption, and politicians are a whole lot less responsive to the people and a whole lot more concerned with siphoning off money for their own bank accounts overseas,” Ross said.

Finding solutions to these challenging issues won’t be easy.

“We have a generation of super-smart young political scientists and economists who are interested in this problem,” Ross said. “Our project is designed to bring together the smartest sort of leading-edge people in political science and economics with the policymakers who are dealing with these problems on a day-to-day level.”

That mission officially begins Sept. 21-22, 2017, with the first PRDG summit at the Luskin Conference Center on the UCLA campus. Researchers and policymakers from UCLA, the World Bank, Barnard College, the University of Pittsburgh, the Natural Resource Governance Institute and many other organizations and universities will make presentations and discuss issues that range from creating successful research-policy partnerships to the research priorities of funders.

The September conference at UCLA was generously funded by the Luskin Center for Innovation, Natural Resource Governance Institute, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Burkle Center and UCLA’s Political Science Department. The initiative also recently received a one-year, $600,000 grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to support additional workshops in Washington, D.C., and Accra, Ghana, and the research partnerships that emerge from these meetings.

“One of the important parts of PRDG is the effort to bring in local researchers,” said Blair, assistant professor of political science at UCLA. “We want to provide training in modern social science research methods, and to provide learning-while-doing at matchmaking workshops where we bring together academics, policymakers and practitioners.”

Providing guidance on policy issues is Christensen, assistant professor of public policy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. “I think policy plays an essential role in this PRDG initiative,” Christensen said. “What PRDG is trying to do is bring policymakers and academics around the same table and allow policymakers to propose solutions and team up with researchers who can go to the field and determine whether these new initiatives are actually helping root out the corruption or address the grievances that often accompany these big mining, oil and gas projects.”

PRDG’s short-term goals include generating a series of new research projects on solutions to problems faced in resource-rich countries, bringing together researchers, policymakers and practitioners. “Another goal is to start joint learning exercises where we go out into the field and try to help build research into their existing program,” Blair said.

In the long term, the UCLA researchers are hoping that the conversation about these issues becomes circular — the research feeds back into the policymaking conversation, which generates new questions the researchers can tackle.

“We want to figure out ways to make a difference, and find ways to fix this problem,” Ross said.