Amac And Montana Exploratory Community Consultation For Environmental Protection Essay

AMAC and Montana Exploratory Community Consultation for Environmental Protection
• What are the issues?
The recognition of shared value is important in maintaining relationship and development as illustrated in the AMAC and Montana case.
The company was faced with the problem of losing their licence to operate resulting from the local community’s perception on Montana’s mining activities and its impact on the quality of water. As illustrated in the text, the local community were heavily influenced by their perception; they believed that Montana’s mining activities contaminated the water supply in the region, which posed a threat to the continuity of operations. They were also faced with communicating issues with the local community. They had no ‘solid’ connection or linkage between them and the community which made it difficult to convey message across to the community or even listen to them. This factor made it hard for the community to differentiate between reality and perception, they only came to a conclusion based on what they could see and did not know or want to believe what the other party had to say on the matter. The issue of communication can be closely linked with lack of trust. Before the creation of AMAC; an independent community based-environmental monitoring committee, Montana mining tried to respond to the community’s water quality issue by using their core competence in environmental management. They established an ‘in-house’ system which proved to be unsuccessful due to the lack of credibility by the local community. In other words, they did not trust the test result by Montana because they believe that the test was still performed by them and therefore is vulnerable to manipulated or rigged.