Needs: Stakeholder identification, collection and mapping of stakes
Who are the stakeholders in Raw Material Intelligence and what are their needs? What are stakeholders’ concrete requirements to the envisaged Raw Material Intelligence capacity platform?
Work Package 2 aims at
- a comprehensive and differentiated inventory of relevant stakeholders, and
- an exploration of stakes (interests/questions) in Raw Material Intelligence and how these are met at the moment.
A broad understanding of stakeholders is a prerequisite for informed decision-making. In addition to the stakeholder groups already involved in raw material decision-making (e.g. UN organisations, EC DGs, national geosurveys, industry associations, political NGOs), Work Package 2 searches for affected and dormant stakeholders. Critical Systems Heuristics are applied to identify actors affected by the strategic choices under discussion. Foresight studies are analysed to identify actors which have the potential to emerge as future stakeholders.
The stakes of a wide range of stakeholders in Raw Material Intelligence will be gathered through direct approach, broad surveys, in-depth meetings and interviews, and a large stakeholder workshop designed to elicit non-apparent stakes and to discuss stakes across different stakeholder groups.
The outcome of Work Package 2 is a synopsis of stakeholders that the MICA project will take into consideration.
Investigation of (RMI-) options for European mineral policy development
Minerals Policy Context
Anticipatory raw materials intelligence (RMI) is developed in a complex context of sectoral policies (mineral, environmental, energy, fiscal, foreign, development, security, spatial planning, water resources, investment, etc.) and regulations at national and international (EU) level, stakeholder needs, and practical data availability constraints. WP5 will first undertake a stocktaking exercise on existing relevant scenarios and international planning documents. It will map those scenarios against the data and tools that will have been analysed in WP3 and WP 4 in order to arrive at benchmarks for future foresight and planning processes. As Europe will need to become more resilient and robust, WP 5 will in particular assess future capacities needed at different levels – for industry, member states, regions, the EU and the role of the EU in international relations – and it will test those recommended capacities with stakeholders. WP5 will go beyond what was/is attempted in the projects MINVENTORY, INTRAW, and MINATURA2020 and will help to prepare European policy makers and stakeholders for the global long-term challenges.
Stocktaking, mapping and key functions of Raw Materials Intelligence (RMI)
The scope and content of RMI will be a function of stakeholder needs of existing long-term scenarios with relevance to RMI. It will assess relevant the implications for raw materials from low carbon scenarios (e.g. IPCC, EU steel technology platform), resource efficiency scenarios (e.g. POLFREE project), and international development documents (e.g. the new Chinese five years plan, African Mining Vision). The minimum set of tools/methods needed to develop a coherent and comprehensive mineral policy-making framework providing a fast response will be investigated. A RMI-MATRIX will be developed, that allows the identification of best, medium and worst cases for RMI development.
Strategic raw materials intelligence approaches
The aim is to develop recommendations for European raw materials foresight approaches, complementary to the operative forecast tools (WP4), where the focus is on near-future planning. The purposes and the methods to be reviewed will be largely qualitative, with the underlying assumption that the experts involved are aware of the data and facts, and thus will be able to formulate opinions needed for strategic RMI. The outcomes of this Task will enable stakeholders to conduct foresight exercises in order to: 1) increase Europe’s capacities for a timely response to anticipated scenarios that concern future raw material challenges (2030/2050 horizon); 2) identify major trends, uncertainties, key decision points, driving forces, needs for future research, etc. against different timeframes; 3) formulate ideas for possible future actions (actively bringing forward a ‘preferred future’) and increasing efficiency and effectiveness of the EU activities related raw materials policy planning. Outputs will provide tools to support RMI for longer-term policy making.
Testing of RMI in Europe and its wider context
The RMI-MATRIX for EU-countries will be screened for the capacities, methods and tools employed. Methods for correlating and transposing information from country reports will be developed for each EU member state. European minerals policies and supporting RMI operate in a context of multi-national players and their governance paradigms, such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the World Bank (WB), the World Mining Ministries Forum (WMMF), and internationally operating mining companies. National governance paradigms influence how RMI can be established. Social licensing and the related governance paradigms and provisions. This task will map out the respective influences to understand how RMI and mineral policies can be implemented effectively and solicit stakeholder feedback on this contextualisation.
The European Raw Materials Intelligence Capacity Platform (EU-RMICP)
Development of an EU-Raw Materials Intelligence Capacity Platform (EU-RMICP) integrating information on data and methods/tools with user interface capable of answering stakeholder questions
A statement of fact:
If specialists have – at least for some facets or sub-domains – the necessary knowledge on how to efficiently use all the data which are available on the Internet to perform various studies, most of the stakeholders do not have the essential skills allowing such an efficient use of these data for solving problems they may meet. Actually:
(i) they neither have a clear and global vision of all the methods and tools that can be used,
(ii) nor know how to implement these methods and tools, their limits of use (requisite characteristics of the initial dataset, scale, accuracy…),
(iii) how to choose the best available technique (BAT) to obtain the expected result(s) and/or, if necessary,
(iv) how to combine or link together several of these techniques.
The objective of the MICA project, and particularly WP6 is to fill this gap in the chain of use of data and to allow the end user to select in a seamless way the best available bunch of technologies for answering his/her question(s)/problem(s). For that, WP6 will create a database of methodologies and tools descriptions with an ontology-based interface to visualize the database content and the relationships between the different techniques, and to search for the most appropriate method(s) and tool(s).
Read more: Development of an EU-Raw Materials Intelligence Capacity Platform