Extractive Industries and Society-An International Journal最新文献

Resource extraction and development projects alter community health and well-being in complex and diverse ways. The extractive industry's impacts on local infrastructure and services are commonly recognized social externalities, yet little detail is available on how these manifest across the healthcare system. This study offers a better understanding of the health service impacts of resource extraction and development. It does this by capturing the observations and experiences of leaders from a rural, regional health authority who have worked with industry to manage impacts on health services during a period of rapid economic development and amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. The study found that impacts from resource extraction and development were experienced first and foremost in emergency departments but were also felt across the entire healthcare system. These pressures were primarily driven by the size of the temporary workforce but also influenced by factors such as the relative size of the workforce to the local community, the local context, and how well impacts were managed at the project level, including the competency of a project's medical service provider.

Environmental, social, and governance standards, along with mining sustainability and transparency initiatives, have taken centre stage in mainstream discussions about how society can source energy transition minerals responsibly. While we acknowledge the importance of private voluntary sustainability standards for improving mining performance and accountability, these must support and complement the crucial regulatory role played by the state and its enforcing agencies in resource-rich countries. From this perspective, we argue that the quality of public institutions remains ‘the elephant’ often overlooked in the room of global mining standards, and we call for re-centring the responsible mining debate around it.

Tailings dam failures and uncertainties on the water impacts of brine-based lithium mining provide examples of why institutional strengthening in mineral-rich countries is crucial. The responsible mining agenda and its implementing instruments should shift from a focus on companies’ performances to one that is embedded in society with the aim of building trust in the sector and its governing authorities. For countries rich in transition minerals, this entails, among other things, reviewing organisational structures, strengthening authorities’ enforcement capacities, and allocating sufficient budget for regulators to deliver their oversight duties and avoid over-reliance on private standards.

The term “artisanal” refers to primitive, non-industrial, or pre-industrial handicrafts. Because they contribute less revenue to state agencies, produce lower mineral export volumes, apply less sophisticated technologies, frequently violate mining certification and licensing arrangements and/or evade state oversight, artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) activities are typically viewed less favourably by host governments than large-scale mining. Despite commitments to render ASM governable, formalisation practices overlook specific dynamics in the sub-sector: notably, the increasing uptake of advanced technologies, its multi-actor nature, and its untold capacity to create employment opportunities and provide adequate raw materials for the domestic jewellery industry. Moreover, unsanctioned mining activities persist despite formalisation efforts. Based on an extensive qualitative study and institutional-level interviews, this article highlights the inevitable complementarities between large-scale mining and ASM. It reveals collaborations between diverse formal and informal actors and institutions that enable and constrain responsible mining in Ghana. It also shows how ASM, and large-scale mining interdependencies maintain each mining scale's operational efficiency and profitability, contributing to this blurring. To grasp the governance challenges in Ghana's gold mining sector, we introduce the “mining-scale embeddedness” framework, focusing on institutional, operational, and actor levels of embeddedness to elucidate dilemmas surrounding gold mining governance.

International trade rules enshrined in agreements like the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) promote free trade, with exceptions for environmental protection. This paper explores the tension between these rules and Earth Systems Science's concept of planetary boundaries, which define environmental tipping points beyond which humanity faces irreversible harm. We analyse GATT's provisions, particularly Article XI's prohibition on trade restrictions and Article XX's exceptions, through the lens of planetary boundaries. Our analysis argues that current interpretations of these articles are inadequate to address the environmental impact of raw material trade. We further examine the concept of permanent sovereignty over natural resources, which grants states autonomy over resource exploitation and trade. We posit that planetary boundaries are not a restriction on sovereignty but a call for modifying state trading behaviour and consequently how international trade rules is structured and interpreted. This analysis demonstrates the complexity of transforming the legal landscape necessary for a global just energy transition, a response to climate change that requires aligning international trade with environmental sustainability.

The Australian mining industry is male and non-Indigenous dominated. Indigenous women continue to perceive themselves as occupying the bottom position on the mine site hierarchy. They experience both racism, sexism, and additional burdens to their male counterparts. Indigenous women have resisted and supported each other against racism including creating formal networks across Australia. It is unknown what, if anything, the industry is doing to break down this hierarchy. Given Indigenous employment data is not typically disaggregated by gender, the cohort has remained largely overlooked in terms of policy or strategy aimed at this group. This paper takes an intersectional approach to understanding what employment policy and practice may assist in dismantling the hierarchy. Qualitative research identified three major themes requiring action: Managing intersectional pressures at work; Intersectionality and career opportunities; and Intersectional risks at work.

This study investigates the crucial influence of institutional frameworks in shaping the resilience of Social-Ecological Systems (SES), focusing on the challenges and opportunities arising from natural gas development in Tanzania's Coastal Area. Despite the economic promise of natural gas discovery and exploitation, managing associated environmental and societal impacts remains a significant challenge. The study uses qualitative methods (key informant interviews, focus group discussions, and field observations) and quantitative data (household questionnaire survey) to analyze governance, institutional capacity, resilience, sustainability, coping mechanisms, and coastal resources management. Applying thematic content analysis to qualitative data identifies critical factors in governance, institutional capacity, relationships among resilience, sustainability, coping mechanisms, and coastal resources management. The study utilized SPSS 20 for quantitative data analysis, incorporating descriptive statistics and binary logistic regression. The findings emphasize governance systems' critical role in promoting societal well-being and resilience to social-ecological changes. Nevertheless, the identified limitations in addressing environmental concerns, including fostering community involvement and ensuring transparency, highlight the need to increase levels of participation from local communities in inclusive and participatory decision-making in project areas. Transparent communication, access to information, and capacity building emerge as crucial for building trust and garnering support. Recommendations include advocating inclusivity, safeguarding local institutions, crafting adaptive governance systems, emphasizing the importance of responsiveness to emerging issues, and robust monitoring and evaluation systems. Concrete natural resource management, particularly in natural gas development, is deemed vital to ensure equitable resource allocation, rectify disparities, and enhance sustainability for the SES in the Coastal Area. This study serves as a guiding framework for regions facing similar resource development challenges, emphasizing the imperative of environmental sustainability for a prosperous future.

There is a surging rate of sand mining worldwide, fuelled by rapid urbanisation and escalating demand for housing and other infrastructure. In Ghana, most residents of sand mining areas are employed in land-based livelihoods, particularly farming. This study examines the effects of sand mining on the livelihoods of the residents in selected communities in the Gomoa East District and Ga South Municipality. The study used a concurrent mixed-methods approach to collect quantitative data from 278 household heads, qualitative data from 30 key informants, and Focus Group Discussion (FGD) sessions with women and youth associations. Statistical Product and Service Solutions, version 21, was used to analyse the quantitative data, while NVivo 12 was used to analyse the qualitative data. The results indicate that sand mining in the study communities had negatively affected the livelihoods of most residents, while the positive effects accrued to the sand miners and truck drivers who were non-residents of the mining communities. It is recommended that policymakers, regulators, and local leaders should address unsustainable sand mining to secure livelihoods in the communities.

The projected 1.20 % annual increase in global energy demand and the expected global population reaching 9 billion by 2030 present a compelling opportunity to develop significant models for incorporating sustainability into oil and gas Supply Chain Management, garnering substantial interest from both practitioners and researchers. The primary objective of this study is to visualize and conduct a comprehensive bibliometric evaluation of 7394 publications relevant to sustainable supply chain management in the oil and gas industry, extracted from the Web of Science (WoS) database spanning the years 1978–2021. By undertaking this extensive bibliometric analysis, this work unveils insights that previous assessments on this subject have not fully captured or examined. The comprehensive mapping of the field provides a graphical representation of the publication history over time, enabling the identification of current research areas and potential topics for future investigation. The findings serve as a valuable guide for leading future research endeavors in the domain of sustainable supply chain management. The results reveal that the authors have focused on three primary topics, which we have identified as leading topics: "Greenhouse gas Emissions," "Life-Cycle Assessment," and "Sustainability." Additionally, we have pinpointed emerging fields in SSCM through our analysis, with four topics investigated in recent studies: "Green Fuel," "Carbon Management," "Industry 4," and "Circular Economy." We anticipate that this study will provide scholars and practitioners with a comprehensive perspective on sustainable supply chain management in the oil and gas industry. It presents questions for future consideration for researchers, thereby contributing to a deeper understanding of the field.

Electromobility and lithium-ion batteries are seen as key for the global energy transition, but injustices have been identified in several stages of the life cycle of electric vehicles, particularly in the resource extraction stage. Little is known about the micropolitics driving the acceptance or contestation of lithium mining by communities directly affected by this activity in the highland Andes of South America. In this paper, we explore complaints and demands made by communities living near Salar del Hombre Muerto, a salt flat in the Argentinian province of Catamarca where lithium has been extracted for decades. Having collected ethnographic data from conversations with affected communities and during public meetings and hearings, we applied a coding process using political ecology and energy justice conceptual frameworks. This led to the identification of place-based complaints and demands associated with distributive, procedural, and recognition justice. We further discuss our findings in terms of recent literature on lithium mining to provide explanations of the justice outcomes identified. Although lithium mining may not be the sole cause of (at least some of) these injustices, it nevertheless generates expectations and catalyzes attempts to end marginalization in areas where local and regional institutions are incapable of doing so.

Policy termination, as a part of the policy process, is a vulnerable component in practice and a long-neglected issue in policy science research. This study focuses on policy termination and constructs an analytical framework of “characteristics-environment-institution-actors” to conduct a case study of industrial project termination near the Wanshouyan prehistoric site in China. It compares the two phases evident during the past half century. This study discusses the factors influencing policy termination by analyzing why Wanshouyan's first phase industrial projects succeeded in their termination, while those in the second phase failed. This study argues that policy termination is subject to the collective influence of multiple variables, encompassing the inherent characteristics of the policy, environmental factors, institutional factors, and actors. Furthermore, political potential energy is crucial in driving termination through the superimposed effect of multi-variable factors.