GUIDE À L'INTENTION DES GOUVERNEMENTS: LES POLITIQUES DE CONTENU LOCAL

This executive summary provides a guide for governments on implementing local content policies in the mining sector to promote inclusive economic development. It outlines a four-step process—aligning with national goals, conducting a situational assessment, policy design, and monitoring—while detailing five types of local content objectives: local procurement, direct local employment, horizontal linkages, downstream linkages, and national capacity building. The document emphasizes that there is no universal model and warns of challenges such as technological automation and international trade law conflicts.

• Local content policies aim to achieve five primary objectives: increasing the procurement of goods and services from local operators, increasing the hiring of local personnel, enhancing the spillover of mining investments into non-mining sectors, increasing the local processing (enrichment) of mining products, and growing the capacity of local actors, including state-owned enterprises, as mining operators.
• The guide proposes a four-step framework for governments: first, ensuring compatibility with national development goals; second, performing a situational assessment (bilan) of current capacities, gaps, and the business environment; third, designing specific policies; and fourth, establishing mechanisms for monitoring, review, and law enforcement.
• Local procurement policies can be based on three different definitions of 'local': geography (registration or execution within specific boundaries), value added (requiring a substantial amount of value to be added within the country), or ownership (focusing on local participation in management, equity, or employment).
• Direct local employment policies are divided into regulatory 'stick' approaches (mandatory quotas, training requirements, visa restrictions, and mandatory hiring of marginalized groups) and facilitation 'carrot' approaches (contract preferences, non-binding hiring requests, and tax incentives).
• Horizontal linkages seek to diversify the economy beyond mining through two paths: infrastructure-based links (where mining roads, ports, or power benefit other sectors) and capacity-based links (where technologies and skills developed for mining are applied elsewhere).
• Downstream linkages focus on the local processing of raw minerals to diversify the economy. Success depends on competitiveness, reliable and cheap energy, and infrastructure, though the document notes there are few successful examples of state-led efforts in this area.
• Technological evolution, specifically automation, poses a risk to local content strategies by reducing the number of jobs per unit of value, which in turn decreases national spending on employee-related procurement (such as food and housing) and reduces opportunities for local maintenance.
• Local content policies may conflict with international trade and investment law, particularly World Trade Organization (WTO) rules that prohibit performance requirements or subsidies conditioned on local content. However, the document states that no extractive industry local content policy has yet been litigated at the WTO.

APA

International Institute for Sustainable Development (2018). GUIDE À L'INTENTION DES GOUVERNEMENTS: LES POLITIQUES DE CONTENU LOCAL. https://www.iisd.org/system/files/publications/igf-local-content-executive-summary-fr.pdf

Chicago

International Institute for Sustainable Development. GUIDE À L'INTENTION DES GOUVERNEMENTS: LES POLITIQUES DE CONTENU LOCAL. 2018. https://www.iisd.org/system/files/publications/igf-local-content-executive-summary-fr.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=International Institute for Sustainable Development |title=GUIDE À L'INTENTION DES GOUVERNEMENTS: LES POLITIQUES DE CONTENU LOCAL |date=2018 |url=https://www.iisd.org/system/files/publications/igf-local-content-executive-summary-fr.pdf |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{internationalinstituteforsustainabledevelopment2018guide, author = {{International Institute for Sustainable Development}}, title = {{GUIDE À L'INTENTION DES GOUVERNEMENTS: LES POLITIQUES DE CONTENU LOCAL}}, institution = {International Institute for Sustainable Development}, year = {2018}, url = {https://www.iisd.org/system/files/publications/igf-local-content-executive-summary-fr.pdf}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }