Fritz Brugger

Last Name

Brugger

First Name

Fritz

ORCID

0000-0003-1992-4492

Organisational unit

03808 - Günther, Isabel / Günther, Isabel

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Publications1 - 10 of 39

An exploratory methodological approach to enhancing public health policy in Ghana's mining operations
Proksik, Joschka J.; Brugger, Fritz; Ayanore, Martin A.; et al. (2025)
Environmental Impact Assessment Review
Industrial mining significantly contributes to the economies and public revenues of numerous low- and lower-middle-income nations, with its importance set to grow due to the increasing demand for critical minerals in the energy transition. Concurrently, the negative externalities associated with large-scale mining are set to escalate if not rigorously managed. Among these adverse impacts, the negative effects on public health have long been disregarded in the governance of large-scale mining projects. This study examines the regulatory and policy landscape governing public health within impact assessment practices in large-scale mining operations, highlighting the inadequacy of current regulatory approaches, particularly the limited attention given to public health within Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs). Focusing on mineral-rich Ghana, we investigate stakeholder perceptions regarding the adequacy of current EIA policy frameworks in safeguarding public health. Applying Q-methodology, we explore diverse perspectives on policy action, priorities, and the involvement of relevant actors in shaping progressive public health regulation within the mining sector. Our findings offer valuable insights into the policy space and potential strategies for strengthening public health in mining activities, with implications for EIA environmental management practices. Moreover, our findings suggest that the divergent policy preferences uncovered in Ghana highlight key obstacles to greater public health consideration through the inclusion of Health Impacts Assessment (HIA), especially in contexts with limited administrative resources. Our study reveals how roles, responsibilities, and authority over impact assessment and mine licensing processes can significantly shape stakeholder policy preferences toward HIA.
Exploring the Impact of Mining on Community Health and Health Service Delivery: Perceptions of Key Informants Involved in Gold Mining Communities in Burkina Faso
Himmelsbach, Gianna S.; Zabré, Hyacinthe R.; Leuenberger, Andrea; et al. (2023)
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
Sub-Saharan Africa is rich in natural resources but also faces widespread poverty. The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals brought increased attention to resource extraction projects, emphasizing their development potential in extraction regions. While mining companies are required to conduct environmental impact assessments, their effect on the project-affected communities’ health mostly lacks systematic management, and their consideration of community perspectives is insufficient. Between March and May 2019, qualitative research was conducted at three industrial gold mines in Burkina Faso. Thirty-six participants, including community leaders, healthcare providers, and mining officials, were interviewed through key informant interviews about their perceptions on the impacts of mining operations on health, health determinants, and health service delivery. Disparities in perceptions were a key focus of the analysis. Mining officials reported mainly positive effects, while healthcare providers and community leaders described enhancing and adverse health impacts without clear trends observed regarding the extent of the impacts on health determinants. The perception of predominantly positive health impacts by mining officials represents a potential risk for insufficient acknowledgement of stakeholders’ concerns and mining-related effects on community health in affected populations. Overall, this study enhances comprehension of the complex interplay between mining operations and health, emphasizing the need for comprehensive assessments, stakeholder involvement, and sustainable practices to mitigate negative impacts and promote the well-being of mining communities.
Swiss Panel Global Cooperation 2022a
Borofsky, Yael; Brugger, Fritz; Büttner, Nicolas; et al. (2022)
How the Energy Transition Redefines the Social License to Operate
Brugger, Fritz (2022)
Palgrave Studies in Energy Transitions ~ The Palgrave Handbook of Social License to Operate and Energy Transitions
The idea that a mining company must engage with local communities to obtain a social license to operate (SLO) has become a key concept in the discourse on responsible resource extraction in recent years. But what is the relevance of the SLO to the energy transition? We show that, contrary to the mainstream discourse, the SLO is a corporate strategy for securing legitimacy not only from local communities but from international stakeholders in the first place. With the imperative of energy transition, international stakeholders now primarily judge corporate legitimacy against their carbon exit strategy. However, the departure of well-known mining companies from coal, oil and gas typically leads not necessarily to a cessation of extraction but rather to a shift to operators who might have fewer incentives and resources to engage with local communities. For minerals that are critical to the energy transition, such as cobalt, a variety of overlapping or even competing industry initiatives are emerging for responsible sourcing. This might be beneficial for some local communities, but questions remain about sustainability once advances in technology dampen demand for cobalt and other minerals. Companies can be expected to reallocate resources and engagement to whatever will then bolster their legitimacy.
Do Social Investments by Mining Companies Harm Citizen-State Relations? Experimental Evidence from Burkina Faso
Bezzola, Selina; Brugger, Fritz; Günther, Isabel; et al. (2022)
The Journal of Development Studies
Do mining companies investing in public infrastructure in their host communities harm citizen-state relations? This study presents results from a survey-based field experiment conducted in two mining areas in Burkina Faso. We test whether informing respondents about investments undertaken by mining companies in domains considered classic government responsibilities affects citizens' legitimating beliefs in their government and their likelihood of political participation. We randomly expose respondents to short audio stories about water infrastructure investments conducted by either a mining company or a municipal government in a fictitious but comparable village. Hearing about private as opposed to public investment leads to worse perceptions of the capacity and the legitimacy of the government in the fictitious village. Yet, the intervention does not affect respondents' legitimating beliefs in their own local government. At the behavioural level, we find that hearing about either public or private investment as opposed to no information at all significantly increases participation in town hall meetings. Our experimental findings suggest that providing citizens in low-income settings information about investment in public infrastructure elsewhere can raise expectations in their own contexts and thereby stimulate citizen-state relations.
The Battle over Policies to Curb Trade-Related Illicit Financial Flows: Findings from a Q-methodology Study
Brugger, Fritz; Proksik, Joschka J. (2024)
International Development Policy ~ Missing Dollars: Illicit Financial Flows from Commodity Trade
Illicit financial flows (IFFs) deprive low-income countries of essential revenues while donors’ willingness to fund aid budgets dwindles. IFFs related to foreign direct investment and trade include transfer mispricing, trade mispricing and profit shifting. Policy options to curb IFFs range from short-term fixes to mid-term measures that adjust legal instruments and improve coordination between countries, to more fundamental structural reforms that require a longer time horizon. Which policies are effective and should be pursued is a highly contested point, slowing down the progress of reform. This is unsurprising as reducing IFFs involves a distributional conflict: more for those deprived of revenues now means less for those who currently benefit. We conduct a Q-methodology study among IFF policy experts. We use Q-methodology to reveal participants’ policy preferences and tease out lines of contestation and areas of agreement to identify the policy space available in which to advance reform. We find tensions existing amid preferences for short-term fixes and for more comprehensive structural reforms; tensions regarding the question of extending legal liability to those facilitating and assisting in the creation of IFFs; and tensions over whether and to what extent host countries should be empowered to curb IFFs using their legislative sovereignty. Policy measures to increase targeted transparency that is directly actionable to tax administrations in host countries are the most likely to garner approval from all stakeholders.
Rising Gold Prices but Lower Incomes for Gold Miners: Evidence on Market Imperfections from Burkina Faso during COVID-19
Van der Merwe, Antoinette; Brugger, Fritz; Günther, Isabel (2024)
Journal of African Economies
Although artisanal gold mining is known for human rights violations and environmental degradation, it is an increasingly important economic activity in many African countries, with a high potential to alleviate poverty. Due to increased demand for gold investment during the COVID-19 pandemic, the monthly international gold price has increased by 20% from January to May 2020. To understand how the COVID-19 pandemic has influenced gold miners, we analyse a panel survey of about 170 artisanal gold miners interviewed 2 months before the first case of COVID-19 in Burkina Faso. Follow-up surveys were done early in the pandemic and about 1 year after baseline. Various pre-existing local market failures caused local gold prices to decrease by 20%–30% from January to May 2020, when international gold prices noticeably increased. Market failures include oligopsonistic market conditions on the mines, which worsened due to travel restrictions that disrupted trading routes, reduced local traders' liquidity and made it difficult for traders to reach mines. Moreover, we find that miners have very little knowledge of international gold prices, and due to insecurity and credit constraints, they are unable to wait for local prices to recover. Once travel restrictions were lifted, the local gold price recovered close to the global gold price. To make local markets more competitive and ensure that miners benefit from rising international gold prices, governments could broadcast world gold prices on local radio, increase trading opportunities and provide access to credits for miners.
Using Q-methodology for policy research and stakeholder engagement to strengthen public health in large-scale mining in Mozambique
Proksik, Joschka J.; Brugger, Fritz; Cossa, Hermínio; et al. (2025)
Sustainable Development
Mining projects can have adverse effects on public health, potentially impacting the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda. While environmental impacts are typically addressed through mandatory environmental impact assessments, public health consequences often receive inadequate attention, despite being a major concern for affected communities. Policy instruments for mitigating these public health issues, including health impact assessment (HIA), remain underutilized, particularly in Africa. We conduct a Q-methodology study in Mozambique to (1) identify policy preferences of government, private sector, and civil society stakeholders for regulating public health in large-scale mining projects; and (2) to actively engage local stakeholders in a national-level dialogue on strengthening public health in impact assessment practise. The findings were successfully used to initiate and inform a policy dialogue in cooperation with local public health professionals and public health institutions, as well as policymakers in the respective ministries.
Why Commodity Booms Have Not (Yet?) Boosted Human Capital: Bolivia’s Struggle to Create a Skilled Workforce
Brugger, Fritz; Lizárraga Zamora, Kathlen (2014)
International Development Policy ~ Education, Learning, Training: Critical Issues for Development
Do windfalls from the extractive sector help developing countries invest in human capital? To date, empirical studies remain inconclusive. Using Bolivia as a case study, this chapter examines the specific political-economic dynamics that led the country to increase spending on education yet at the same time failed to build a skilled workforce. Overall, the study finds that while the mining sector continued to seek unskilled, cheap labour, the capital-intensive hydrocarbon sector, for its part, developed on-the-job training programmes. Meanwhile, education policies failed to anticipate evolving demand from the labour market. As a result, vocational training suffered, a situation further compounded by efforts of powerful groups in the education sector to protect their own, somewhat narrow interests, at the expense of educational achievements. It concludes that the rise of private education and popular skills-based training programmes cannot substitute for development of a functional vocational training system, capable of supporting the country’s ambition to develop a world-class lithium processing industry with linkages in strategic sectors.
The state and the legalisation of illicit financial flows: trading gold in Bolivia
Brugger, Fritz; Proksik, Joschka J.; Fischer, Felicitas (2024)
New Political Economy
Most research on illicit financial flows (IFFs) has focused on illicit outflows from low-income countries and the role of non-state actors in generating IFFs. Less attention has been paid to processes through which IFFs enter formal value chains – in effect being legalised before leaving the country – or the crucial role of state institutions as gatekeepers. We develop a novel explanatory approach to account for the enabling role of state institutions in the legalisation of IFFs. Building on political settlement theory, we explain the performance of institutions in regulating IFFs as a function to maintain political power. Taking the case of Bolivia, we examine how legalising illicit value flows works in practice and analyse the motives and underlying conditions that lead state institutions to permit the formal export of gold shipments that have been illicitly sourced or transferred. We find that the legalisation of IFFs accommodates the interests of powerful cooperatives dominating the gold-mining sector, which are critical to maintaining the political settlement on which the incumbent government’s power is based. By maintaining a status quo of non-enforcement, legal ambiguity, and informality, gold-mining cooperatives reap higher benefits from resource extraction at the expense of domestic revenue mobilisation.

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Fritz Brugger

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