“The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the understanding and discussion of how the costs and benefits of natural resource development are shared across society. This paper presents how IFC, as both an investor and a development organization, determines whether benefits and costs are shared reasonably, and how this assessment influences IFC’s decision to invest in
a particular natural resource project.2
Through its long experience in the sector, IFC has
learned that investments likely will run into problems
at some point in their life cycles if there are imbalances
in the sharing of fiscal, economic, environmental, and
social costs and benefits. By describing IFC’s thinking
and lessons learned, the goal of the paper is to promote
a broad, constructive dialogue across stakeholders—
governments, investors, civil society, and others—
around benefit sharing.
The paper draws on IFC’s experience and presents an
overarching framework for multi-stakeholder benefit
sharing, providing analysis and guidance for a range of
complex topics. The paper is intended to provide entry
points for stakeholders of varying levels of familiarity
with the issues to benefit-sharing assessment. The paper
is not a definitive manual for all the issues covered
for which more detailed, high-quality and excellent
references and literature exists.3”