Sustainable Development (MMSD) project. The World Mining Congress now returns to Lima. The questions have not disappeared. The stakes are higher. 2. SUSTAINABILITY AS STRATEGY, NOT A REPORTING CATEGORY When Gro Harlem Brundtland introduced sustainable development to the world in 1987, she was careful to insist that ‘the environment does not exist as a sphere separate from human actions, ambitions, and needs.’ She understood that the heartbeat of sustainability is human behaviour. The definition she offered — development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs — challenged the world to embrace a new way of thinking, being and acting, and to find resolutions for conflicts in values, interest and power. It spoke to questions of conduct and culture. In the decades since, we have struggled to hold onto that essence.¹ The original force of sustainability was strategic. It was not simply a desired state, a reporting system or an environmental label. It was a way of making decisions in circumstances where environmental, social and economic considerations must be held together rather than sequenced or traded off after the fact. Those three streams do not exist in the Abstract. On any watershed, in any region and around any mine, they are personified by people and institutions: communities, Indigenous nations, local governments, regulators, employees, investors, suppliers, environmental organizations and companies. Each operates with different currencies of value. For one party, value may mean return on capital. For another, cultural continuity, water security, employment, local procurement, political accountability, environmental stewardship or intergenerational well-being. The strategic challenge is not to reduce these currencies to a single metric. It is to build outcomes across them. Sustainability hits the ground when those different value systems must be translated into a decision that people can live with and help implement. In that sense, sustainability is not an adjunct to strategy. It is strategy: the discipline of constructing decisions that can hold technically, socially, environmentally, politically and over time. As sustainability became translated into ESG frameworks, much was gained in transparency and discipline. But something was also lost. Metrics began to overtake meaning. Reporting frameworks can show what has happened; they do not by themselves provide the navigation system for deciding what should happen next, with whom, and through what process. The issue is not whether metrics matter. They do. The issue is whether they serve the strategy or replace it. Sustainability ultimately lives or dies through culture. In complex organizations, no ESG framework or reporting structure can consistently deliver resilient outcomes unless sustainability is embedded — up and down and across the organization — as a shared way of thinking and acting. At the same time, the influence of Indigenous peoples has grown 156
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTM0Mzk2