Community Relations in the Other Poland
To give some context to her talk at the Global Shale Gas Plays Forum in Krakow, Poland, Community Relations in Poland: A Local-Level Approach, Patrycja Kujawa, Country Manager – Poland at LNG Energy Ltd., introduced the concept of “Two Polands.”
“This is something exploited on the political scene, through lack of knowledge on hydrocarbon extraction,” she said.
“Poland #1” she described as “Poland moving forward, the EU, young people ambitious and climbing. Visitors to Krakow and Warsaw see this,” she said.
She showed the country’s impressive vital statistics, like its 3-4% annual GDP growth.
Then Kujawa showed a picture of rural Poland, “Staying behind” where the minimum wage is about $400/month, 17% of population are living beneath the poverty line, 12% unemployment and a higher span of income distribution.
She explained: “There are some feelings of unfairness here; not all people believe economic growth will benefit them. I’ve heard this in the countryside: ‘The wealth is going to go to the people coming in driving fancy cars.’”
It's such attitudes that LNG, a Canadian exploration company focused on Papua New Guinea, Poland and Bulgaria might encounter at its exploratory drilling operations in Poland.
LNG, she said, had 5.5 million acres in five licenses in Papua New Guinea, and was shooting seismic.
Ms. Kujawa reported that in Bulgaria the company was spudding an exploration well.
“In Poland we’re involved in five concessions, four in the Baltic Basin and one in the Podlasie Depression,” she said.
She proceeded to discuss some of the challenges of community relations in rural Poland.
For one, her presentation showed that Poland had been experiencing decreasing urbanization, with more people moving to the country, a counterintuitive trend. The size of farms, she said, were small.
“There are over a million agricultural holdings in Poland, and about 50,000 in Alberta Canada,” she said which was twice the size of Poland. “With more people living off the land, there is increased subsistence farming."
Ms. Kujawa noted that half of farm income in Poland came from EU subsidies, something which she said could not last forever. She asked, “How are these people going to live? We can give them another way to make money off their land.”
She said there was a great lack of knowledge in rural Poland about what hydrocarbons production entailed.
“Where we are there has never been any seismic done,” she explained. “They have no idea what a drilling rig looks like. The process is foreign to the people there.”
She showed the relative low level of Internet penetration in rural Poland, surmising that it was not the best way to communicate messages to communities; local authorities did not always respond to their e-mails. Rather, Kujawa suggested locally tailored public relations strategies, because she said there were huge differences.
Power, she said, was at the local level in Poland.
“It’s not a federal state, so voivodeships are not their own little states. It’s very bureaucratized, and a large number of officials have some level of decision-making power,” she explained.
Furthermore, she said that officials had varying degrees of knowledge. “They may not understand what you’re asking them to do,” explained Kujawa, who recalled driving to a county hall to sit and listen to what a problem was, which was holding things up. She said it was solved in half a day.
She got into some of the intricacies of understanding Poland’s administrative governmental units, i.e. “powiat’s” and “gmina’s.” She explained, for example, that relevant powiat jurisdiction includes transport and roads, etc., while a gmina is also responsible for its roads, water use, land use, and waste disposal, among others.
Then, she spoke about “black PR,” giving a mention of internationally renowned activist Jose Bove’s visit to Poland in June of this year to shine his spotlight on Polish shale gas.
She said, “He was going around saying that members of a community were saying that their water was running black, that houses were collapsing. It didn’t get a lot of traction but this has been starting. My contacts in the press say they’re getting e-mails promoting Gasland, with video clips showing flaming taps.
“I think it’s ramping up so we need to get to the people first,” she said.
“Why doesn’t anyone make a movie on the benefits?” questioned Kujawa. “When people come in with these crusades, they are the ones that have a monopoly on truth. They have stories that sound real, they feed on people’s ignorance and feed on people’s most base fears, and feelings of injustice.”
One of Kujawa’s slides showed Gasland filmmaker Josh Fox on one side, in a gas mask playing the banjo, while the other half had Jose Bove wearing a hamburger on his head. She pointed out that these “characters” had some appeal to the common man, something which the E&P industry was missing.
She said of LNG’s operations in Poland, “We put a tremendous amount of emphasis on our local relations strategy. We understand that if we screwed it up, or if there’s too much noise it’s not going anywhere.”
Her slide showed interaction with authorities, with journalists, with local people, or with anyone who had her telephone number, which she said she had been publishing in local newspapers.
“People call me with different things, some want to get together and chat.”
Kujawa gave an example of community relations: having an LNG representative attend a local event in which contestants had to hammer a nail in a stump with an axe. That person’s picture appeared in a local newspaper near the company’s drilling operation. “If you missed, you had to drink a shot of vodka,” she said.
She said that the company’s community relations strategy included a series of films about the shale gas industry in Poland, with a series of interviews done with people where wells are being drilled.
At the end of her talk, Kujawa showed one of LNG’s films which featured interviews with local leaders near a shale gas concession, what they’d experienced, and what their concerns were.