Prevention, Resolution, Resilience: What Canada’s Role as Chair of the Voluntary Principles Initiative Means for Human Security
By Morgan Fox, Queen’s University
Human security is loosely defined as a framework for understanding and protecting people’s rights, beyond their right to freedom from violence and death. It can range from economic security to environmental security, but in the extractive industries, it is usually understood in the context of human rights, conflict prevention, and security. To understand how these concepts are applied in practice, it is necessary to look at guidelines such as the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights (VPSHR) which heavily influence the conversation and direction of human security in the mining and resource extraction sector.
The VPSHR are promoted by the Voluntary Principles Initiative (VPI): a multi-stakeholder group comprised of governments, NGOs, and companies in the extractive industries. The goal behind the VPI is to create a forum for participants to share best practices and address concerns relating to security and human rights in a business context.
For the 2021–2022 year, Canada is the Government Chair of the VPI Steering Committee, a position it has previously held from 2011–2012 and 2016–2017. The role involves scheduling, chairing, and proposing the agenda for the Steering Committee’s monthly meetings. In practice, the Chair also sets the Initiative’s priorities for the year, which heavily influences the VP’s operations and discussions. For example, in the 2020–21 year, Australia emphasized the importance of conflict prevention tools and regional forums.
Canada has been particularly explicit about its priorities for its chairmanship. Its goals include developing guidance for engagement with human rights defenders, supporting VP implementation in smaller organizations, promoting domestic implementation through working groups, and identifying ways the VPs can improve human rights for women, girls, and other marginalized groups.
These goals are indicative of Canada’s foreign policy goals more broadly. The focus on the status of women in a human rights context is an example of the cross-cutting emphasis Canada places on the Women, Peace, and Security agenda. Australia’s prioritization of conflict prevention tools is present in Canada’s goal to improve engagement and dialogue with grassroots actors. A recurring theme of these priorities is multi-stakeholder engagement: ensuring that all the relevant players are acknowledged, included, and heard when problems are being raised and solved.
Beyond reflecting Canada’s priorities from a foreign policy perspective — such as sexual and gender-based violence and engagement with human rights — these goals are also indicative of the general priorities of groups and companies in the extractive industries. While successful implementation of a human rights focus has varied, businesses are aware of the importance of human security among members of the public, particularly after heavily publicized scandals involving human rights abuse allegations. Governments and NGOs play an important role in ensuring these priorities are followed through, and this is especially evident in the structure of the VPI. The Canadian government can signal to Canadian companies the importance of human rights and conflict sensitivity in their various operating areas, but they can also provide funds and resources to encourage genuine implementation.
Despite the importance of highlighting priorities in the human rights and security sector, numerous obstacles are preventing the achievement of these goals. Aside from current issues, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the extractive sector frequently encounters barriers in the security and human rights sector, particularly in fragile or conflict-affected areas.
A frequently overlooked obstacle, for instance, is corporate culture. In some companies in the extractive industry, there is a disconnect between the official rhetoric regarding conflict resolution and engagement with the local community and the on-the-ground reality that doesn’t practice those skills. In other companies, site-level workers — particularly those that work in community relations — feel ignored and dismissed by those at the managerial level. Problems like this become ingrained, and when external conflicts do arise, such as rising tensions between community members and private security forces, they become serious impediments to conflict resolution.
The VPI’s multi-stakeholder approach, by way of including governments, NGOs, and corporations in its organization, helps counter this, but it still leaves blind spots when it comes to conflict prevention and resolution. In other words, Canada’s goals as chair of the VPI will struggle if businesses lack the tools to accomplish them or are too overwhelmed dealing with external conflicts to begin contemplating these larger-scale issues. There are numerous resources to help with these problems (such as the Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance and International Committee of the Red Cross’s Security and Human Rights Knowledge Hub and the Australian Red Cross’s War, Law, and Business module on international humanitarian law), and tools that offer more guided directions.
One that tackles the issue of corporate culture in particular is the Conflict Prevention Tool for Developing Multi-Stakeholder Strategies, created as part of an incubator project between the Centre for International and Defence Policy (CIDP), the Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance (DCAF), the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and the extractive resource company AngloGold Ashanti. In some ways, tools like these are most successful at creating opportunities for dialogue about human security, conflict prevention, and corporate culture, especially between management levels and departments that wouldn’t interact otherwise. Outside of the VPSHR, these tools also support other international guidelines, such as the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.
Overall, non-prescriptive, practical tools and resources like these are crucial for businesses in the extractive industries and for Canada to implement its goal as VPI Chair. For corporations, they justify the importance of a human security approach to resource extraction, by rooting the tool in practical examples of the direct and indirect costs conflict imposes on a company. By offering suggestions and frameworks for ensuring the success of the priority list, these tools also ensure that goals determined by corporate management do not become divorced from on-the-ground realities. And these goals are important: human security is, and will likely remain, a priority of a wide variety of national and international entities, ranging from the United Nations and the International Red Cross to the governments of Canada and Australia to major mining corporations based in Africa and South America. But if the goals can’t be implemented by individuals and groups on the ground, the goals of human security will quickly lose their meaning.
Morgan Fox is a third-year undergraduate student at Queen’s University, majoring in Politics, Philosophy and Economics. As a research assistant at the Centre for International Defence Policy she studies NATO’s implementation of the Women, Peace, and Security agenda and assisted with the creation of the incubator team’s Conflict Prevention Tool, which you can learn more about here.
