Graduate Diploma Program

What is Social Performance Management?

Social Performance Management refers to the rigorous management of a comany's community relations activities, in order to better address evolving community needs, industry constraints and provide accountability to all stakeholders.

What is Community Relations?

Community relations (CR) is a critical component of corporate social responsibility (CSR). It is especially important for companies associated with large industrial and infrastructure projects, including exploration, mining, oil and gas, where project scale has the potential to create environmental disturbance and social instability.

What Do Community Relations Professionals Do?

Community relations professionals manage a company's engagement with affected communities to build constructive and mutually beneficial working and living relationships.

Stakeholders for large projects include different levels of government, communities where the project is proposed, civil society/non-governmental organizations, and company shareholders. These groups have different perspectives and typically, are themselves internally diverse, so the job of the CR professional is challenging as well as fulfilling.

Why Study Social Performance Management at Queen's?

Greater public awareness and evolving international conventions have led to a demand for improved, systematic, and verifiable, approaches to community and stakeholder engagement. From impact assessment and mitigation, culturally appropriate models of community support and assistance, methods for contribution to regional economic development, as well as dispute and conflict resolution, responsible resource companies require a unique set of knowledge and skills to fulfil this demand.

Queen's University's Graduate Diploma in Social Performance Management in the Extractive Sector (DSPM) has been designed with input from industry, government and civil society organizations to prepare students to work in diverse contexts - from central Africa to the Andes to remote regions of Northern Canada- where Canadian extractive companies operate.