Enrolment in the seminar will be limited to first and second-year MAPPS students, at least initially. Should enrolment exceed eight participants, the group will be subdivided into groups of no more than five participants. These groups will work in parallel.
This 3-credit graduate project seminar is intended to offer students in the Master in Asia Pacific Policy Studies an opportunity to develop their policy analysis and presentation skills. The seminar is organized entirely around the collective drafting of a policy report on a question set by the instructors and participants.
This particular incarnation of the policy project will attempt to grapple with questions surrounding the sustainable (socially, economically, and environmentally) extraction of minerals in Mongolia. The seminar aims to provide the basis on which participants will draft a 50-year agreement between a generic Canadian mining company and the Mongolian state that will govern the exploration and extraction of gold and copper in Mongolia. Such an agreement by nature will include provisions on taxation, royalties, time periods of licenses, ownership and employment requirements, governing rules and regulations as well as dispute resolution mechanisms and other elements. The final collective submission will also include supplementary discussions of issues around the decisions made in the proposed agreement.
The project will be driven by participants' decisions with the guidance of the instructors. The first task of participants will therefore be to organize a schedule of meetings, deadlines, etc. While the first section of the semester will most likely be devoted to an exploration of fundamental issues involved (resource extraction in developing countries, regulation of foreign investment, etc.) and of background materials (information about the project requirements, etc.), meetings will soon have to focus on concrete tasks associated with the drafting of the final agreement. Participants will be evaluated on their individual contributions to the collective product. Evaluation will include presentation of the final draft agreement to interested parties.
"Higher education" implies that students acquire applicable skills, but especially that they learn to understand the world around them more thoroughly. While such an understanding does require specific techniques (writing and analytical tools, etc.), the biggest leap that social science students make is to find ways in which social relations can be analyzed to arrive at conclusions that can be accepted by other analysts and that can therefore form the basis of further research or applications.
This view of higher education dictates that the central objective of teaching is to foster a familiarity with the fundamental logic of social-scientific reasoning and to apply such reasoning with some specific tools to other areas of inquiry. This is especially true of graduate education, which represents an in-between step form undergraduate education where knowledge is primarily consumed to academic positions where knowledge is produced. Graduate students are at once consumers as well as consumers of knowledge and this will be reflected in this seminar. Given the open-ended nature of the task assigned for the project, it will be especially important that participants regard this seminar as their own and push ahead with planning and making their own contribution.
Beyond gaining a greater understanding of the social world around us, a policy program like MAPPS strives to provide students with skills and tools to address contemporary policy challenges. The policy seminar emphasizes this latter connection more heavily and explicitly than typical graduate seminars.
The role of the instructors is to help seminar participants organize themselves in a fashion that integrates social scientific knowledge and its application as it will be expected in roles graduates might take on in the future. Beyond orchestrating the course and supervising its organization, instructors provide their own academic research and experience as a knowledge base to direct and guide participants' explorations.
Mongolia emerged form the break-up of the Soviet Bloc around 1990 with severe economic challenges. As is the case with many countries of Central Asia and Eastern Europe, the Soviet period despite its despotism and crimes brought a modicum of economic stability to Central Asia that had largely been lost since the demise of the Mongolian empire and the great Asian trading routes.
Within COMECON, the Mongolian economy primarily provided meat products and wool in addition to the large copper operation at Erdenet that was a Russian-Mongolian joint venture. As COMECON collapsed - and guaranteed markets and development aid with it - Mongolia found itself struggling in the 1990s and the 21st century to provide for a small, young population of 2.4 million people roughly a third of whom continue to engage in nomadic animal husbandry.
In the course of the 1990s, mineral finds emerged as a real opportunity for Mongolia to move beyond the increasing dependency on foreign aid that emerged in the post-Soviet period. Recognizing that foreign investment was necessary to explore and, ultimately, extract some of the mineral riches to be found in Mongolia, the Mining Law of 19?? attempted to create a favourable investment environment to attract foreign investment. Canadian junior mining companies emerged as some of the biggest investors in Mongolia, led by Ivanhoe Mines of Vancouver.
Although most mineralogical and geological findings seem to suggest a significant wealth of minerals, their exploration and extraction has been hampered by a challenging policy environment. While Mongolia has become a reasonably stable democracy with several peaceful changes of governments, allegations of corruption have challenged governments' legitimacy and thus their ability to act vis-a-vis mining interests. Hasty decisions by the Great Hural (Mongolian parliament) to impose a surtax on "windfall" profits linked to global prices of copper and gold in the spring of 2006 have created an environment of uncertainty that seems to threaten the potential benefits mining could bring to Mongolia.
While the potential of economic development associated with mining in some ways seems to be Mongolia's best chance at economic development, the extraction of minerals obviously brings many political and environmental challenges and risks. Corruption is one clear challenge. Environmental pollution is an obvious concern with mineral extraction as well. Ultimately, economic sustainability will depend not only on the creation of safe jobs related to mining and on long-term opportunities for skilled workers, but also on reinvestment schemes for the royalties and taxes collected from mineral extraction. Finally, political parties have repeatedly raised issues around the perception of Mongolia's wealth being "given away to foreigners". Such concerns also need to be addressed by any policy decisions if the agreement proposed is to have the popular legitimacy required to be viable in the long term.
Obviously, most of these issues are not peculiar to Mongolia, but could be and have been examined in contexts as varied as Nigerian and Venezuelan oil and South African gold deposits.
Canadian and other mining companies have attempted to negotiate so-called "stability agreements" with the Mongolian government that would provide a long-term framework governing the investments necessary to move from exploration into a production phase. Although some smaller agreements have been signed, much of the industry and its backers are watching the negotiations between Ivanhoe Mines and the Mongolian government very carefully as a signal of what is to come in terms of the long-term attractiveness of investments in Mongolia.
The goal of this policy seminar is therefore to craft a draft "stability agreement" that could be presented to the interested parties (Canadian companies, as well as Mongolian government and party officials, NGOs, the press, etc.). While the aim of such a draft should not be a legally signable document in terms of its formatting, care should be taken to spell out the principles that might resolve legal issues at least to some extent, for example, around dispute resolution or applicable laws. Clearly, the drafting of such a document requires a significant amount of preparatory work. As participants meet to plan their activities, they will likely want to plan an initial period to investigate the specific circumstances in Mongolia, as well as the history of similar agreements in Canada as well as elsewhere. Similar preparatory tasks might include the examination of recent schemes to distribute national wealth such as the Norwegian oil investment fund or various privatization mechanisms in countries of the former Soviet Bloc.
The final draft of a stability agreement should go beyond the format such an agreement might take between a private corporation and a government, in that it include some discussion of scenarios of future developments considered in the deliberations as well as a discussion of the likely impact of the agreement on various stakeholders. Such discussions should include some limited modeling of commodities markets and likely profitability of mineral extraction, especially in comparison to alternative sources. Employment and economic development projections for Mongolia will also be an important consideration.