Anticipating the Emergence of New Stakeholder Groups

client community stakeholder groups vary considerably in terms of their origin and ethno-cultural affinities, soa and familial-affinity groups, languages and dialects, religious affiliations, economic occupations and profession, and in numerous other ways. The socio-cultural diversity of Tanimbarese people and communities are simultaneously a hallmark characteristic of the region and a perennial source of political tensions. Any spontaneous migration and settlement of humans in the area can be expected to introduce a range of new concerns for current local inhabitants, such as regards the adequacy of public infrastructure, services, utilities, housing, sustainable resource management, and other issues related to the lists of potential positive and negative impacts listed above.

A rough typology of potential new and expanding (non-local) stakeholder groups that may emerge as either a direct result of the client, or due to public anticipation of its arrival include:

• returning family, extended family members, and former residents of the area, including opportunistic returnees seeking improved living conditions and employment, or opportunities to provide goods and services
• project employees from outside the project area (expected to have little interaction with local community members)
• temporary or permanent workers / laborers employed by the project or its contractors
• unskilled, semi-skilled or skilled people seeking direct or indirect employment or entrepreneurial opportunities
• migrant entrepreneurs, including small and medium enterprise owners, seeking to capture business opportunities associated with increased demand for goods and services associated with the local population’s higher levels of disposable income
• service providers to the project
• entrepreneurs and SMEs; aiming to secure contracts to provide goods and services
• traders aiming to capture substantial increases in disposable income through provision of goods
• money lenders encouraging community members to borrow money under conditions not familiar to them; their increasing economic power is often associated with co-opting local political leaders and elites
• commercial sex workers

Consultancy would like to note that the delay in project disclosure about its activities (and the limitations thereof, such as limitations in local investment and workforce recruitment) risks building unrealistic expectations about potential project benefits, and therefore also risks further exposing local stakeholders to speculative in-migration.

A well-structured social baseline framework can help to identify and account for different forms of in-migration by examining demographic composition of income-earning activities, changing compositions of economic classes and changing access to economic activities and income streams. While such measurements are extremely important at villages and towns proximate to the project site, it is also critical for the client to measure and evaluate for project-induced impacts in areas further afield, as such may still fit squarely within the project's 'area of social influence'.