In 2007 the Bench Marks Foundation published Policy Gap 1, looking at the impacts on local communities from platinum mining in the North West province. The findings showed that despite the great value extracted from platinum mining, there are harmful social, economic and environmental impacts on local communities, and the mining companies have yet to assume their responsibility for the negative consequences of their mining activities. This report revisits the initial one to look at what changes have taken place, and further aims to investigate the perceptions that local communities have of mining companies to evaluate the corporate personalities of these companies. In order to increase the participation of local communities, participatory action research was chosen as a methodology.
The corporations surveyed in Policy Gap 6 include Anglo Platinum, Impala Platinum, Lonmin, Xstrata, Aquarius and Royal Bafokeng Platinum Limited. Although they all have corporate social responsibility programmes in place, the overall findings of this study show that they all fail to meet the standards of the Principles for Global Corporate Responsibility – Bench Marks for Measuring Business Performance.
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http://www.bench-marks.org.za/research/rustenburg_review_policy_gap_final_aug_2012.pdf
