Mark Schubert

Background

About Mark Schubert

Mark enables resource extraction projects in culturally complex, difficult and remote locations to obtain, maintain and add value to their Social License to Operate, the most risk free way to meet commitments to shareholders - by creating sustained alliances between Projects and the surrounding Peoples. In developing the best possible strategies to elicit co-operative alliances, he continually experiments while in a Project Zone and, when out of the field, tests and develops strategies based on the latest research and insights from cultural neurology, human behaviour and social organisation. Mark’s ability to elicit sustained cooperation and commitment from Peoples surrounding Projects comes also out of his training as an anthropologist, he having done fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, Fiji, China and rural and urban Australia. It also comes out of his upbringing in the Eastern Pacific (Pitcairn Island), Central Pacific (Fiji) and Western Pacific (PNG). Further, his approach to issues around your Project is in a spirit of “Win-Win”, as Mark says “the test of a project is whether the surrounding people would ever ask you or anyone else back”; as well as his own particular style of patient observation and listening: a corporate colleague remarked after working with him for a week that “this guy is open to everyone, almost to his own detriment …. he exhausts himself”, while a clan elder from the Gulf of Papua working with him in the Kikori Delta said to a corporate colleague “You can talk to him he is easy to talk to …. he will listen, he gives good advice”. This good advice is alongside and informed by the analyses and assessments that Mark does of Projects'​ environmental, economic and social impacts (ESIAs), not just to satisfy national and international legal and funding requirements, but to identify ways Projects can enhance the lives of the People (and ultimately protect shareholders' investments).