Central actors

Based on minutes of meetings, the actors who participated in the first phase of the planning of the aluminium smelter operation are identified. Further the actors’ formal roles and tasks are identified through the contract with Greenland Development, the terms of reference for the SEA working group, a statement from the Cabinet regarding the role and function of Administrative Coordination Group and the MoU document.

65 Administrative

Coordination Group:

Administrator Should manage the process (Greenland Home Rule 2007c).

SEA working group: Producer of information

Should secure that a proper SEA was carried out as decision support for the political decision makers (Greenland Home Rule 2007d).

Greenland Development:

Negotiation Unit and

‘key account manager’

Should discharge negotiations between Alcoa and the Government of Greenland and collect data for the decision support material (Greenland Home Rule 2007e).

Cabinet: Authority Should formulate a proposal for a decision on location and inform the Parliament.

Alcoa: Applicant Should conduct technical investigations and economical feasibility studies (Greenland Home Rule 2007b).

Parliament: Formal Decision Maker

Should decide on a site for the aluminium smelter.

Business Directorate:

Planning secretariat Should meet and respond to demands from the Administrative Coordination Group and The Cabinet.

Table 6.2: Actors and their roles and functions in the decision-making process.

An organisation diagram for the actors in the first phase of the planning process of the aluminium smelter is illustrated in Figure 6.1.

The Administrative Coordination Group was responsible for the economic administration of the project (Jæger 2010). The Business Directorate was appointed to function as the secretariat for the Administrative Coordination Group. The members of the Administrative Coordination Group were appointed from the very top of the organisational hierarchy within the Government’s administration and included directors from the departments of economy, environment, business, infrastructure and housing, minerals and petroleum. The Director of the Business Directorate functioned in this phase also as the chair of the Administrative Coordination Group, and the general administration of the aluminium smelter was simultaneously located in the Business Directorate. Furthermore selected employees from Greenland Development were associated to the Administrative Coordination Group as scrutineers (Hansen and Hansen 2008) The objective of the Administrative Coordination Group was, according to the Director of the Business Directorate who was also chairing the Administrative Coordination Group:

… to investigate some more closely defined issues regarding the MoU in separate phases to avoid more money being spent than necessary, before it was clear if the project was implementable or not. (P. Hansen 2010; Quote from interview translated from Danish by the author)

Furthermore, a company, Greenland Development A/S, was established in 2006, first as an affiliate of the Greenland Tourism and Business Council, but since the summer of 2007 placed

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directly under the Cabinet, to handle the communication and negotiations between Alcoa and the Cabinet. There were different reasons for placing Greenland Development close to the Cabinet. Initially the reason for establishing a company instead of a negotiation unit within the administration of the Government was in the interests of handling information discretely, so Alcoa would not risk public accessibility of confidential information (P. Hansen 2010). The confidentiality enjoyed by potential mining investors in their relation to the Bureau of Minerals and Petroleum in Greenland could not be directly copied to this project, as this protection in relation to minerals investors was stipulated in the Danish Minerals Act – now the Greenland Minerals Act. Later, the protection of confidentiality has been set up as a contract between Alcoa and the Cabinet in the MOU. Still there were other reasons for keeping this structure, among others because of difficulties of recruiting the necessary competencies to the Business Directorate. There was also a risk that the project might draw too much focus and personnel from other administrative tasks within the directorate – or conversely – that the daily operational needs would draw necessary resources from the developing project. Since the project’s inception it has been taken for granted that it should be possible to close down the project with relative ease and limited additional expense if need be; for instance, if the hydropower proved insufficient, if there were indisputable environmental showstoppers, or if Alcoa were to pull out (Drechsel 2010):

I tell every new employee that they should not expect to grow old in Greenland Development – we have short-term office leases, and the only fixed asset the company has on our books is our photocopier. Thus, if the government should at any point decide that Greenland Development shall not carry out our tasks anymore, our organisation can be easily dismantled. (Drechsel 2010; Quote from interview, translated from Danish by the author)

Besides upholding the communication and negotiation with Alcoa, Greenland Development was also given the task of collecting information, and passing it on to the Administrative Coordination Group, from both Alcoa and from external consultants, regarding technical, economical and social aspects of the project (GD Service contract, 2006, Drechsel 2010).

According to the Director of Greenland Development A/S, the main task for the company was to ‘secure a smooth negotiation process with Alcoa towards an implementation of the project’. He further explains:

Large and modern foreign companies like Alcoa are used to communicating and negotiating with local authorities. What they really need is a local contact that can point them in the right direction and create a contact with the people they need to talk to and have an overview of the approvals it is necessary to gain in order to implement the project. That is the function we have in Greenland Development. You could call us key account managers. We have a service to sell.

We want to sell an investment opportunity in our country, but not at any price.

In order to succeed, any project must offer a competitive return on investment, and the host country must provide an investment-friendly environment.

However, it is a clear obligation for us to help ensure, that through regulation, taxation and an adaptable workforce, the project must also bring substantial long term advantages for our country. (Drechsel 2010; Quote from interview, translated from Danish by the author).

67 The Board of Greenland Development A/S was largely composed of government officials. In the period analysed the company had a board consisting of five members: the Director of the National Power Authority, the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Industry, the Permanent Secretary of the Premier’s Office, the Director of the Environmental Agency and Choef Financial Officer, and the Vice President of Tele Greenland.

Thus, there has always been a very close link between GD, the Administrative Coordination Group, the Business Directorate and the Cabinet.

There was no legal requirement for the Cabinet to include the Parliament in the site selection process. However, the Cabinet (both the former and the present ones) argued that, due to the scale and permanence of these decisions, they should be made by the Parliament, and with the greatest possible inclusion and consensus amongst the parties. Thus the Cabinet chose to delegate authority to the Parliament ( Drechsel 2010, Jæger 2010).

Cabinet Alcoa

Greenland Development

Business Directorate

Administrative Coordination

Group

SEA Working group Information

and negotiation

MoU

Service-contract

Parliament

Figure 6.1; Organisational structure of the actors in the first phase of the MoU (Hansen 2010).

When the MoU was signed in May 2007, the Administrative Coordination Group decided to set up an SEA working group to coordinate the SEA process. Two other working groups were simultaneously established regarding socio-economic matters and labour relations. Unlike the SEA working group these were set up within institutions in the form of actors on the scene, namely Greenland Development and the Business Directorate (Jæger 2010, Drechsel 2010). The SEA working group was set up as a working group under the Administrative Coordination Group and was cross-departmental. As chair for the SEA working group, the Administrative Coordination Group appointed the head of the Department of Physical

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Planning, which is positioned within the Department of Environment and Nature. The SEA was organised to be placed externally, and not in other institutions related to the planning of the aluminium smelter, based on recommendations from Professor Lone Kørnøv of Aalborg University, who was guiding the authorities, and also on the assumption that a more independent working group was necessary to avoid conflicts of interest regarding environmental and economical issues (Drechsel 2010, KG Hansen 2010, P Hansen 2010). The SEA working group was set up across the relevant directorates, and a budget of approximately 1.5 million US$ was approved. The SEA chairman was affiliated to the Administrative Coordination Group for cases that were directly related to the SEA process (KG Hansen 2010, P Hansen 2010, SEA 2007). The chair of the Administrative Coordination Group explains why the environmental assessment was not integrated into one of the other related institutions:

The environmental responsibility was anchored within the environmental directorate for the SEA working group to take care of the coordination. It was our opinion that it had to live its own life, to make sure that everybody could see that the environmental interests were not suppressed. We could say to the politicians and the public that somebody had it as their main task to secure the environmental investigations and bring them forward in the decision-making process to avoid conflicts of interest. (P Hansen 2010; Quote from interview translated from Danish by the author).