To Market, to market: How do responsible minerals standards affect trade and sustainable development?
Professor Peter Draper, Executive Director, Institute for International trade, University of Adelaide
Electronics, jewellery, automotive and other industries increasingly require ‘responsible sourcing’ of critical raw materials, using voluntary sustainability standards (VSS) to certify ethical mining. This shift is likely to change global value chains for a range of minerals and metals, such as bauxite, coal, cobalt, copper and tin. Professor Draper’s work on the trade impact of standards on small and medium-sized enterprises in Africa shows challenges in a range of different sectors. Has this been the experience in mining? How could we measure trade impacts of responsible mining standards, and why does it matter to the agenda for sustainable development?
Professor Peter Draper
Peter is Executive Director of the Institute for International Trade in the Faculty of the Professions, University of Adelaide, Australia. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the International Chamber of Commerce’s Research Foundation; non-resident senior fellow of the Brussels-based European Centre for International Political Economy; Associated Researcher at the German Development Institute (DIE); and a Board member of the Australian Services Roundtable. He is a recipient of an honorary Doctorate degree from the Friederich Schiller University in Jena, Germany. For ten years he was, respectively, member, chair, vice chair, and co-chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on the Global Trade and FDI system. Previously, he worked in South Africa’s national Department of Trade and Industry in bilateral economic relations (East Asia and Mercosur), and as head of the economic analysis and research unit in the dti’s International Trade and Economic Development Division. Prior to that he was an academic teaching economic history and political economy, and headed the Department of Economics and Economic History at the then University of Durban-Westville (now University of KwaZulu-Natal).