State governments are very much in the global investment attraction game, with drilling co-investment the most popular incentive tool being pulled out of the investment toolkit in various guises.

Such initiatives show how geoscience in Australia has evolved over many decades – such that the ready availability of basic geoscience information is now taken as a given by the private sector seeking to explore in Australia. To attract a greater share of the exploration investment pie, the competing jurisdictions are looking for that extra incentive that first brings in the incremental dollar of exploration activity – but then hopefully leads to new discovery.

On tour in South Korea last week and working with delegates drawn from the geological surveys across a number of emerging international destinations, Strictly Boardroom stitched together the following high-level framework to attract exploration dollars to a country. The framework is akin to building a house – starting with the foundations and going on from there.

Here is a simplistic view of how emerging resource economies around the world can position themselves for private sector exploration success, initially via the provision of public sector geoscience information. This was the counsel given by Strictly Boardroom to delegates from countries as far afield as Cameroon, Chile, China, DR Congo, Laos, Malaysia, Mozambique, Myanmar, Peru, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey and Vietnam,

1. Lay the Foundation Stones: - Understand and publicise the history of mining and exploration in a country – including the economic impact of mining upon country-building development and infrastructure. The aim here is twofold: Firstly to lay out the grounds for future prospectivity analysis by minerals companies seeking to explore in the country. Perhaps more critically however, this information helps build awareness of mining and educate the broader public in a country (including Australia as an aside) as to critical the role of mining to the economy – past and present. This ‘pre-wires’ a country towards for future successful mine development.

2. Build the Architecture - Data & Mapping: Obtain country-wide new primary field datasets; encompassing geology, geophysics and geochemistry. There are both right and wrong ways to do this technically - but plenty of technical assistance is available to avoid pitfalls. For the private sector to be able to value properties for future investment, base-case regional datasets are a must. With such data, the public and private sector can determine the correct value of mineral property rights to conduct exploration. Without such data, exploration will not eventuate – or perhaps worse-still the value of key mineral property rights is in greater danger of misappropriation.

3. Open the Doors – Provide Access to Online Information: It is no good having geoscience data and mapping (and a working mineral licence system) if people can't either see or use the information easily. This is a key failing in many emerging jurisdictions. Getting data online is like opening up a shop front.

4. Invite Guests in: Showcase your prospectivity and mineral policy benchmarked against others and the concessions available for early entrants. In emerging jurisdictions this may mean lower lease commitments for early birds – and in advanced mining jurisdictions the likes of state co-funded drilling grants.

5. Put on a movie/show: Beyond concessions, commence state-funded 4D geoscience work to unlock the more challenging geological mineralised provinces (loop this information back into point 3)

Simple really - yet seldom executed without many complex challenges along the way. There is no perfect one-size-fits-all answer of course – but some answers out there in the global exploration landscape are certainly better than others. It is to those jurisdictions with the better solutions that the incremental exploration dollars will flow.

Watch that space.

Allan Trench is a professor at Curtin Graduate School of Business and Research Professor (Value & Risk) at the Centre for Exploration Targeting, University of Western Australia. He is also a non-executive director of several resource sector companies - and the Perth representative for CRU Consulting, a division of independent metals & mining advisory CRU Group (allan.trench@crugroup.com).