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.