Stakeholder Participation and Advocacy Coalitions for Making Sustainable Fiji Mineral Royalty Policy

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.