Evaluating social performance in the context of an ‘audit culture’: a pilot social review of a gold mine in Papua New Guinea.

The growth of sustainable development frameworks that emphasize the social dimension has created a need for new approaches to evaluate social performance. The paper describes the design and pilot of a social review conducted at the Lihir Gold Mine in Papua New Guinea. The aim was to investigate more integrated measures – understood as combining qualitative and quantitative measures, and bridging international and local community standards – of social performance. The paper discusses the demands of time and resources placed on a range of stakeholders as part of a review. It then identifies impediments to developing integrated approaches, and analyses these with reference to Power's (1999, 2003) discussion of an emerging audit culture, which focuses on management systems rather than first-order questions of quality and performance. The authors conclude that, while an audit culture influenced this pilot study, an integrated approach on these two dimensions remains an achievable goal. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]