Navigating the Linkage between Culture and Strategy: A Guide to Understanding the Analytical Cultural Framework for Strategy and Policy

Mail yesterday included U.S. Army War College Guide to National Security Issues, Vol. 2: National Security Policy and Strategy, 5th Ed., Edited by Dr. J. Boone Bartholomees Jr.

Read Chapter 20 late last night. It’s an excellent piece by Thomas Sheperd entitled: Navigating the Linkage between Culture and Strategy: A Guide to Understanding the Analytical Cultural Framework for Strategy and Policy.

We spoke of the centrality of culture in our recent work on tribal responses to the impacts of climate change and to various mitigation and adaptation technologies.

The Sheperd piece caused me to rethink exactly what the centrality of culture means and how it translates into communications and capacity building strategies. Highly recommended. Here’s an excerpt I found helpful:

"Cultural knowledge does not guarantee success—the very complexity of the system guarantees that chance will produce both good and bad, both intended and unintended, outcomes and effects. Nevertheless, cultural knowledge may help reduce the possibility of resistance to, or serve as a way of anticipating, the possible outcomes of strategic choices."

The full publication can be downloaded at: http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/display.cfm?pubID=1110

Travels with Laurence

We (Jeanne Rubin and Merv Tano) at the International Institute for Indigenous Resource Management are going to miss Laurence Pernot at our tribal conferences, roundtables, and site visits. Ever gracious, she’s a great spokesman for AREVA and the nuclear energy industry in general. And, more importantly from our perspective, she sees a need for and promotes the transparency and accessibility to information that for so long characterized the relationship with the industry and Indian tribes. We are grateful for her and AREVA’s support of our efforts in this regard.

On the other hand, since we’ll continue our work with tribes and other indigenous peoples on nuclear energy and radioactive waste management issues, we’re looking forward to meeting with her on our periodic fact-finding visits to la Belle France.

The first photo was taken at after Laurence addressed the member tribes of the Council of Energy Resource Tribes at its November 2009 annual meeting in Tulsa, Oklahoma. With her in David Conrad, an Osage who is at present the Director for Tribal and Intergovernmental Affairs at the U.S. Department of Energy.

The photos below were taken in Avignon during tribal and First Nation site visits to AREVA facilities in France arranged by AREVA and IIIRM. Members of the Navajo Nation, Osage Nation, Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, and others were on the trip.

AREVA Community Advisory Council Visits National D-Day Memorial

On May 2, 2012 the AREVA Community Advisory Council, as part of a site visit to AREVA’s facilities in Lynchburg, Virginia, took a guided tour of the National D-Day Memorial located in Bedford—the town that suffered the highest per capita D-Day losses in the nation.

Surrounded by the Blue Ridge Mountains, the park-like memorial is for those who are aware of the events of June 6, 1944, a powerful and emotional reminder of the sacrifices made by those who participated in the débarquement et de la Bataille de Normandie and for those not yet aware, an opportunity to learn more about the largest amphibious assault ever.

AREVA, with its links to France, is a major supporter of the D-Day Memorial and its programs. The Memorial is supported by contributions to the National D-Day Memorial Foundation a 501(c)(3) not-for profit organization. Click here to make a donation to the Memorial.

New Mining Magazine – Mine

http://viewer.zmags.com/publication/9ce5bc6e#/9ce5bc6e/1

This new e-publication just came across my virtual desk. Graphics-intense and designed to be read on-line, Mine takes full advantage of Adobe Flash Player’s features. But that means it’s a news magazine and not a serious journal and like so many e-publications Mine finds it necessary to protect its intellectual property by making it impossible to cut and paste excerpts to reviews, articles, or blogs.

Notwithstanding these petty complaints, Mine looks to be a worthwhile read. This premier edition includes an article on what seems to be the universal plight of industry—workforce development. In Mined Out?, an article by Chris Lo, BHP Billiton states that the Australian mining industry will require an extra 150,000 workers over the next five years. The problem in Australia is not a lack of prospective recruits, but finding workers with the requisite skills and experience for complex mining and engineering jobs.

If I’m reading Lo correctly, he or she seems to be saying that the community college-industry workforce development partnerships so prevalent in the U.S. is absent in Australia mainly because of the industry’s sense of entitlement and unenthusiastic investment in skills development.

I’m not certain what lessons for Indian tribes can be gained from the Australian experience but it’s an issue that bears continuing scrutiny.

Wind Systems Article: Seeking A Skilled Workforce

http://www.windsystemsmag.com/media/Digital_Editions/may_2012/windsystems_201205.html

I rely on Wind Systems magazine for the latest information on wind generation engineering, technology, and maintenance issues. I think it’s must reading for tribes considering wind generation. A bonus is that it’s free for qualified subscribers.

The May 2012 edition surprisingly contained a gem of a non-technology, non-engineering, non-maintenance article by Mike Moore, vice president of sales for Shermco Industries. It’s a thoughtful, even philosophical, piece on the problems the renewable energy industry and we as a Nation face in developing the skilled workforce to fill the emerging jobs in renewable energy and industry in general.

Moore describes the 46 million “X Generation” of sons and daughters of the Boomers who did not wholly move into the skilled trade sectors, but instead went to college, sought professional degrees, jobs, and technical assignments, overall making much less income than their Boomer parents. They are officially the first generation to challenge the notion that that each generation will be better off than the one that preceded it. The study “Economic Mobility: Is the American Dream Alive and Well?” focuses on the income of males 30-39 in 2004 (those born April, 1964 – March, 1974) and is based on Census/BLS CPS March supplement data. The study, which was released on May 25, 2007, emphasized that in real dollars this generation’s men made less (by 12 percent) than their fathers had at that same age in 1974, thus reversing a historical trend.

There’s nothing new in Moore’s suggestion that we build a strong “skill pipeline” from high school into college and to the workplace to provide an adequate number of skilled applicants for every type of position. What is new, at least to me, is Moore’s observation that although the possibilities are endless for the Y generation to move into the skilled trades, it does not appear with the current trending to be the case anytime soon. And more troubling is his suggestion that the answer in the short term to who will fill the skilled trades’ gap may lie with international workers who possess similar skills, training and qualifications very similar to that of the native-born American counterparts.

Reactor Stress Tests-Anyone Know What These Entail?

http://www.ensreg.eu/node/389

From the ENSREG press release: “The national European regulators and the European Commission as European Nuclear Safety Regulators Group (ENSREG) and the European Commission have made their best efforts to make the stress tests process as transparent as possible, and to ensure the best possible accessibility to all interested stakeholders and the citizens. Transparency and public accessibility have been acknowledged as key objectives from the beginning of the process.”

The subject of stress tests came up during a conversation between members of the AREVA community advisory council and some of the AREVA technical staff in Lynchburg, Virginia just after we viewed a purpose-built device designed to shake the bejeezus out of some reactor components. It’s good to know that utilities are taking steps to ensure their reactors can stand up to Fukushima-magnitude earthquakes. But we all agreed that notwithstanding the stated goals of transparency and accessibility, except for industry and regulators, the general public, which is the ultimate arbiter in deciding whether the industry undergoes a renaissance or not, has no idea what a reactor stress test is all about. Do they include computer simulations, sandbox exercises, actual testing of the physical integrity of reactor systems and materials, or all of the above?

I have no sense as to who it is who should be ensuring transparency and public accessibility. Is it the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry group or the utilities or the NRC? But believing as I do, that nuclear energy is a key part of the decarbonization of power generation, I think it’s an industry-wide responsibility.

10 Reasons Why Energy Storage Is Essential In The 21st Century by Tim Haïdar

I’d add an 11th reason—distributed energy systems will be a feature of Indian reservations.

 

10 Reasons Why Energy Storage Is Essential In The 21st Century by Tim Haïdar

AREVA Participates in CTUIR Energy Roundtable

On September 7-8, 2011 the Department of Science & Engineering of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation held the Roundtable on Private, Public, and Tribal Collaboration on Workforce and Supply Chain Opportunities in Energy: The Role of Corporate Social Responsibility.

The Roundtable brought together high level tribal, industry, and other leaders and experts in the diverse fields of related to energy, environment, science and technology, research, workforce development, business development, and education in a series of facilitated dialogues to examine federal and corporate social responsibility policies to determine how such policies can support private-public-tribal partnerships to increase tribal participation in all facets of energy development. AREVA, with Susan Hess, Anna Markham, Celia Gentz, and Denise Weiss, was well represented.

The discussions suggested several areas in which the interests of AREVA and the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation and other Indian tribes converge. The Tribe has treaty interests in the Hanford Site which require the Tribe’s Department of Science and Engineering to be knowledgeable about all facets of the nuclear fuel cycle. Stuart Harris, the Department director, was part of a tribal delegation that toured many of AREVA’s waste management and other facilities in France. A CTUIR delegation also toured AREVA’s Richland fuel fabrication facility to get a sense of the facility’s operations and to begin an exploration of employment and supply chain opportunities. AREVA has now agreed to conduct a more detailed briefing for the CTUIR’s economic development and planning staff on how to do business with AREVA. Similarly, AREVA will now communicate employment opportunities to the Tribe’s employment office.

Perhaps the most important AREVA contribution to the Roundtable was Susan Hess’ description of the proposed clean energy research parks. The parks concept, appropriately modified for tribal purposes, provide a conceptual framework to organize ongoing and future tribal energy activities and collaborative efforts in a wide range of research, training, generation and other arenas.

Some Not Quite Random Thoughts on Indian Energy

Of late I’ve been talking with all sorts of folks about energy, climate, and Indian tribes.  These are folks from federal agencies, tribal governments, mining companies, utilities, and grassroots organizations.  I’ve also been reading all manner of technical reports, documents, and articles from professional journals and the popular press. What follows is a rough take on these readings and conversations.

Here’s something from the January 15, 2011 New York Times:

BEIJING — Aided by at least $43 million in assistance from the government of Massachusetts and an innovative solar energy technology, Evergreen Solar emerged in the last three years as the third-largest maker of solar panels in the United States.

But now the company is closing its main American factory, laying off the 800 workers by the end of March and shifting production to a joint venture with a Chinese company in central China. Evergreen cited the much higher government support available in China.

A little heavier is the December 2010 Atlantic article by James Fallows, Dirty Coal, Clean Future which makes the argument I’ve been making, that Indian tribes and the U.S. cannot afford to abandon coal. He maintains that that coal can be used in less damaging, more sustainable ways than it is now and further, that it must be used in those ways, because there is no plausible other way to meet what will be, absent an economic or social cataclysm, the world’s unavoidable energy demands. The article is at: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/12/dirty-coal-clean-future/8307/.

A couple of years ago when I was in Albuquerque talking with the board of the Diné Power Authority I stated that a mine-mouth, coal-fired generating facility was not going to fly. The fact that the Sithe technology was state-of-the-art wouldn’t matter. My point was that the Desert Rock Energy Project had to be a test bed for clean coal and carbon capture and carbon sequestration technologies. I said that Indian country and the U.S. could not afford to have the project fail. To do so would mean we (the Navajo Nation, Indian country, and the U.S.) would lose the opportunity to use a state-of-the-art facility as a test bed for these and related technologies. Fallows says pretty much the same thing. The generating facilities in the U.S. are not suitable test beds for such R&D, but the Chinese ones are and will be.

Then there are much more weighty readings.  For example, the European Commission has identified 14 mineral raw materials, including several metals and metal groups, which have high supply risks and could face shortages resulting from limited production sources and high demand.

An expert group assembled by the Brussels-based commission studied 41 minerals and metals groups to compile the “critical” supply list. Minerals on the critical list are antimony, beryllium, cobalt, fluorspar, gallium, germanium, graphite, indium, magnesium, niobium (also known as columbium), platinum group metals (PGMs), rare earths, tantalum and tungsten. The experts concluded that demand might more than triple for some of the minerals between 2006 and 2030 and released forecasts of demand growth from emerging technologies for nine of the minerals as well as silver and copper. They said the growing demand for raw materials is driven both by the growth of developing economies and new emerging technologies. The EC report can be accessed at: http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/policies/raw-materials/critical/index_en.htm.

In a similar vein, the U.S. Department of Energy developed a Critical Materials Strategy to examine and address the vulnerability of supplies of these rare earth elements that are crucial to so many new and emerging clean energy technologies. That report is at: http://democrats.science.house.gov/Media/file/Reports/DOE_CriticalMaterialsStrategy.pdf.

Here’s a passage from the report:

Current global materials markets pose several challenges to the growing clean energy economy. Lead times with respect to new mining operations are long (from 2–10 years). Thus, the supply response to scarcity may be slow, limiting production of technologies that depend on such mining operations or causing sharp price increases. In addition, production of some materials is at present heavily concentrated in one or a small number of countries. (More than 95% of current production capacity for rare earth metals is currently in China.) Concentration of production in any supplier creates risks for global markets and creates geopolitical dynamics with the potential to affect other strategic interests of the United States. Value-added processing and some patent rights are also concentrated in just a few countries, creating similar risks. (p.12)

The report provides an example of such value-added processing and patent rights concentrations.

Master patents on NdFeB or neodymium magnets constructed of an alloy of neodymium, iron, and boron (a key component of wind turbines and hybrid vehicles) are controlled by two firms: Hitachi Metals (formerly Sumitomo) in Japan and Magnequench, a former U.S. firm that was sold to a Chinese-backed consortium in 1995 (Dent 2009). Hitachi has used this intellectual property protection to capture a large portion of the market for high-quality magnetic materials, while the Magnequench sale gave Chinese companies access to the intellectual property and technology necessary to establish production plants and further increase supply chain integration. Licensed production of sintered NdFeB magnets is currently limited to 10 firms in China, Japan and Germany. (p.16)

Here’s why I think this tribal leaders should read this report:

1. It demonstrates that these days jobs follow the market. China is the world’s largest energy market and is thus able to require technology providers to locate plants in China and to share intellectual property. This is happening with wind, solar, nuclear, and coal.
2. It demonstrates that jobs follow the intellectual property–an equivalent to the golden rule, i.e., him that has the gold makes the rules.
3. It demonstrates that these days and for certain materials, jobs follow the resource. But see no. 5 below.
4. It demonstrates that, notwithstanding the popularity of the slogan in Indian country, everything really is connected but it takes a lot of vision, effort and political acumen to make the connections.
5. And most importantly, it demonstrates that need for tribes to impose their vision on energy development in Indian country.

Let me use the Desert Rock Energy Project as an example.

1. The Navajo Nation sold the Project as economic development, employment and tax revenues. There was some discussion of sovereignty and self-determination but I do not recall seeing anything that spoke to the human rights, indigenous rights, or nation building implications. The Desert Rock Energy Project was viewed as a Navajo Nation problem although it had national and even international implications. More importantly, the Desert Rock Energy Project was conceived and sold as a coal project.
2. Sithe viewed the Project as a business proposition begetting amongst other things, permitting issues.  Navajo Nation was a commercial partner.  They build and operate power plants so it’s understandable that they took this view.  They never considered themselves a partner of the Navajo Nation in a nation building exercise, but they were.
3. Elouise Brown and Dooda Desert Rock did a terrific job organizing against the Desert Rock Energy Project. However, they were helped immeasurably by convergence of three phenomena.  First, the economic meltdown which hit California especially hard drove down the demand for power. Also aiding their cause was California’s Renewables Portfolio Standard, one of the most ambitious renewable energy standards in the country. And finally, scarce and expensive natural gas—one of the primary justifications for the Desert Rock Energy Project turned out to be not so scarce and not so expensive after all.

So what would the Desert Rock Energy Project look like if it had been shaped using a nation building, intellectual property and value-added frame?  Here are some ideas—not a complete and comprehensive program, but a good place to start.

1. It would start off as a Navajo Nation sustainable energy production, research, development, and training program.  Although not geographically co-located, energy production, R&D, supply chain opportunities, workforce development, environmental restoration, long-term monitoring, education, and related activities would be administered centrally.  It would be, in short, the Navajo Nation Energy Program.
2. The Sithe-Navajo Nation Desert Rock Project would be a major part of the program because coal is an important Navajo Nation resource.  Also a major part would be research on clean coal technologies; coal-to-liquids; carbon capture and sequestration; coal gasification; coal bed methane.
3. The Navajo Nation Energy Program would be subject to a programmatic environmental impact statement that would take a comprehensive look at the costs and benefits with benefits being defined much more comprehensively than revenues and jobs, i.e, what those revenues and jobs would mean to the social, cultural, health, educational, and other interests of the Navajo Nation and the Navajo people.
4. Based on much consultation, it would carve out possible roles for the National Laboratories; entities like the Energy & Environmental Research Center, universities, private sector, tribal organizations, NGOs, and other tribal and non-tribal stakeholders.  Exactly what kind of near term and long term relationship does the Navajo Nation contemplate having with SCE and APS?  What do kind of relationship do they contemplate?
5. It would contemplate the establishment of a cadre of Navajo experts in facilitating public participation; public information; project negotiations; right of way and easement negotiations; risk assessment; energy project financing; and other aspects of energy development on the lands of indigenous peoples.  These are the kinds of operations that can just as easily operate out of Phoenix, Albuquerque, Denver, Sao Paulo, and Sydney as they could in Window Rock.
6. It would link energy development with environmental restoration.  Energy developers move dirt.  The Environmental Protection Agency assesses and regulates.  The Navajo Nation needs strong relations with both.  This means working and collaborating with energy companies and their associations to define exactly what corporate social responsibility policies should play out on Navajo.
7. It would take a very hard look at the wide range of economic, social, cultural, political, and other opportunities that might be realized by working on the waste management and environmental restoration aspects of energy development.
8. The program would include a strong intergovernmental-relations component that would represent Navajo Nation views and policies in state capitals, the U.S. Congress, as well as national and international tribal and other indigenous forums.  For example, how does Navajo leverage its transmission corridors to gain waivers from California’s Renewables Portfolio Standard?

Time for Indian country to get serious about energy policy. That bustling green economy of solar panel manufacturers, blade fabricators, and the like is a chimera. I stated this on my Facebook page. Federal agencies, Indian tribes, and tribal organizations need to cut through all the PC, faddishness, and get down to the serious business of Indian energy.

Why Indigenous Peoples Should Worry About the Price of Gold

Situational awareness: Knowledge and understanding of the current situation which promotes timely, relevant and accurate assessment of friendly, competitive and other operations within the battlespace in order to facilitate decision making. An informational perspective and skill that fosters an ability to determine quickly the context and relevance of events that are unfolding.   U.S. Army Field Manual 1-02 (September 2004).

A response to my posting of a news article on rising gold prices elicited this comment, “the same sense of irrelevance is true for posts by Mervyn Tano regarding the price of gold and illegal timber harvesting.”

I suppose relevance, like beauty, lies in the eye of the beholder. And more to the point of the comment, it lies in how the beholder sees the world and the role of mapping and the mapping staff in helping tribal decision makers advance and protect tribal interests. What follows is our view of the world and the role of mapping presented not to convince but to explain.

We, at the International Institute for Indigenous Resource Management, see tribes and other indigenous peoples as engaged in a long war of ideas that’s manifested in competition for land, resources, and political and cultural identity. We view tribal GIS staff as the G-2 or intelligence arm of the tribe and not merely an element of the tribal land and natural resource management agency. We see the tribal GIS staff as central to meeting the needs of tribal decisionmakers to shape and attain the tribe’s strategic and policy objectives in that long war. By helping tribal decision makers see first and understand first, the tribal GIS staff enables them to acquire and deploy the right resources at the right time to successfully advance and protect tribal interests.

In our workshops on the National Environmental Policy Act in Indian Country we suggest, as the first step in shaping tribal strategies, that tribal staff describe the baseline—the who, the where, and the what. This is the objective, not subjective reality and should include all potentially affected resources, ecosystems, and human communities. This would include an elaboration of the characteristics of the geographical area in which activities that can affect tribal interests will be occurring. These may include, among others, geophysical, political, economic, and sociological characteristics such as:

• Demographics.
• Industrial base.
• Land ownership.
• Federal, state, and local government officials.
• Unemployment rates.
• Water quality.
• Nongovernmental organizations.

We strongly suggest the baseline description also include the larger global context. There may not be immediately obvious connections between tribal concerns and global issues such as the graying of the developed world, the ascendancy of Brazil, Russia, India and China, the implosion of the global economy, or globalization in the form of free trade and open markets but if the tribe is concerned about mining or the overexploitation of marine resources, there may indeed be important connections. Here’s where we see the relevance of the price of gold. For a tribe sitting amidst gold-bearing sands gold at $900 an ounce in July 2009 may be just be so much dirt. Today, with gold at over $1260 an ounce, those sands may soon be a mine. $900 gold may require a map generally outlining the resource and a warning that “here may be dragons.” At $1300, that map better describe the number and size of those dragons and how they’ll be fought.

In short, we see enhancing situational awareness as the raison d’être of the tribal GIS staff.