Extractive Industries and Society-An International Journal最新文献

An expanding array of transnational Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) standards has emerged to mitigate harms across critical minerals supply chains. This proliferation of international, private governance standards is interacting with domestic, public regulations guiding mining activity in resource rich states. When private and public requirements duplicate, overlap, or diverge they can create inconsistent processes, administrative burden, and dilemmas through a patchwork of basic components in supply chain management (Cashore et al., 2021). Applying a typology of interactions between private authority and public policy to lithium mining in Argentina, we argue that private/public rules are loosely complementary in some respects and independently coexisting in others. Comparing a rigorous private standard, the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance (IRMA), to public regulations we find that both include similar provisions for environmental protection and public participation . IRMA provides better protections for indigenous peoples’ participation, though it lacks significant enforcement mechanisms. Questions remain over the private sector's ability to guarantee – in practice – the rights of indigenous and other affected communities, or to protect ecosystems in the rush for critical minerals. Resulting governance dilemmas illustrate an increasingly crowded regulatory space in lithium mining that indiscriminately presumes public regulatory gaps, while it privatizes accountability.

Global aspirations for stringent mercury regulations have not been translated effectively in Russia, largely due to the emergence of new domestic cinnabar mining ventures. These initiatives have increased locally sourced mercury, reducing its cost and undermining efforts to curtail its use. This study employs Stochastic Multicriteria Acceptability Analysis (SMAA) within an environmental finance framework to rigorously assess the challenges associated with mitigating mercury use in artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) in Russia. The sampling period for the research spans from June to September 2018 in the Krasnoyarsk Krai area, comprising Yeruda and Chebyzhek villages in the Kurakhinsky district and Abalatskoye village in the Minusinsky district. The paper investigated these complexities using SMAA to identify the multifaceted challenges in implementing the Minamata Agreement, a global treaty committed to regulating and curtailing mercury use. The findings revealed that mercury management is associated with various socioeconomic factors, labor relations, and power structures that have collectively hindered mercury-free practices in gold mining. Therefore, this study highlighted the critical need for a holistic, sustainable economic framework by incorporating new insights into the societal metabolic functions of dynamic mineral finance. Utilizing SMAA within the specific context of native employment conditions, the authors challenged the prevailing norms and offered robust, data-driven strategies aimed at reducing or eliminating mercury usage in ASGM.

The ongoing global transition to low-carbon energy relies on access to energy transition minerals (ETMs), bringing to life new mining projects. This shift is particularly impacting the Global South, due to high levels of interaction of mineral deposits with territories of Indigenous peoples and peasants, weak governance and remoteness. Focusing on the sustainability and justice of energy transitions, previous research has identified a range of environmental and social impacts of ETM mining across Global South countries. We argue that current research overlooks impacts of energy transition-related mining on tangible and intangible cultural heritage of land-connected people. This paper seeks to address this gap by examining the intersection of ETM mining and sociocultural practices in the Global South from spatial, governance and justice perspectives. Based on an extensive literature review, this article critically addresses key themes in the literature on the social aspects of energy transitions and uses cases from Ghana, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Chile, and Papua New Guinea (PNG) to demonstrate the immediate and long-term sociocultural impacts associated with ETM mining. It is important to foster an all-encompassing approach to planetary just energy transitions that places equal weight on ensuring cultural alongside environmental, economic and social sustainability.

The discovery of significant natural gas reserves in Tanzania prompted the government to develop policies and regulatory frameworks for better management of this sector. Nevertheless, knowledge of how these policies and regulatory frameworks facilitate local community participation in the sector is scant and attention to these issues is limited. We use qualitative data and the Context Interaction Theory (CIT) as our lens to analyse the sectoral policies and regulatory frameworks to understand whether and how they facilitate local community participation. Our analysis revealed that the natural gas policies and frameworks have to some extent facilitated local community participation through provision of employment opportunities, participation in the implementation of Corporate Social Responsibility projects and protection of the gas infrastructures. However, meaningful local community participation is constrained by various factors including inadequate qualified and skilled individuals among the locals; misinformation to local community members; and insufficient awareness on the natural gas policies and regulatory frameworks. We recommend policies and regulatory frameworks that support local capacity development and empower local government authorities to develop their capacity for translating policies into practice on local community participation. These measures should involve ‘policy learning” from countries that have been successful in developing inclusive participation policies and responsive institutions.

The European Union's new battery regulations represent an ambitious effort to regulate the full lifecycle of global battery production. However, questions have been raised about their ability to regulate the social and environmental performance of mining and battery manufacturers. This article provides a critical reflection on the new EU legislation, focusing primarily on the “upstream” end of extraction for global battery and electric vehicle production. We make three claims: first that the EU's battery regulations represent a partial “hardening” of transnational supply chain governance that allows companies to undertake their own due diligence by outsourcing reporting and verification obligations to third-party auditors; second that the regulations prioritize issues that reflect EU interests, as opposed to communities affected by the recent surge in demand for battery metals; and third, that the regulations are embedded in a wider economic and geopolitical conflict that tends to disfavour producer states.

New critical metals mines are being prospected throughout the U.S. to meet the needs for batteries for electric vehicles, as well as solar and wind technologies. Mineral prospecting is meeting growing opposition from coast to coast, including Arizona, Idaho, California and Alaska. This article draws attention to the northern state of Minnesota where a complex social movement is emerging to challenge the devastating local contamination that might result from new “green nickel” mining. Focusing on Talon Metal's Tamarack project as a case study, the article describes how tribal communities and their social movement allies are challenging this green energy paradox through cultural, legal and political strategies.

This article interrogates the governance of minerals mining using the lens of leadership and the case study of Ghana. Some experts estimate that small-scale mining accounted for the removal of 25 % of forest cover in Ghana's southwestern areas within the decade ending 2017, despite only accounting for a third of the country's gold production. Despite the centrality of minerals for Ghana's energy transition ambitions and recent alarm expressed by the government, civil society groups, and the international community about the pervasiveness of the crisis, it persists and afflicts environmental sustainability, health and livelihoods within the mining catchment areas. Using primary data from several interviews, digital ethnography, and observations, I depart from existing discourses that document the scope and impact of the crisis to quiz instead, the reasons behind the persistence of the ‘illegal’ small-scale mining despite availability of laws and public pronouncements by government and other stakeholders against it. The findings show that the absence of process-oriented leadership – that is, the predictable, accountable, and participatory leadership that reconciles the interests of the state and society – accounts for the persistence of small-scale and illegal mining. I propose the utilisation of the social license at the disposal of members of society as a bottom-up remedy to reverse this trend.

Serving as a regional assessment of China's ongoing mining and application of REEs, this article addresses the concurrence of green transition and environmental degradation contextualized in the global sphere of the Critical Mineral mining and application. It narrates a history of China's developmental strategies for REEs mining and production since the late 1970s and addresses the environmental outcomes from the state-determined, globalized national economy and the state-initiated environmental regulations on domestic REEs mining. Focusing on a historical assessment of China's geopolitically-strategized Critical Mineral production and the high environmental cost of the REEs-based green transition, this article discusses how UN's concept of sustainable development is being indigenized in China through the Chinese state's policy practices as well as through the receptiveness of the Chinese populace, and supports the ongoing argument of just transition as an unjust energy transition creating unjustified environmental dispossession, particularly in the local societies in China and elsewhere in the world.

This study explores the socio-economic impacts of the pandemic on mining value chains, using a mixed-methods approach. A thematic analysis, based on open-ended survey questions and interviews, was performed to determine the impacts on value chains and employee welfare and determine the coping mechanisms. The survey data, gathered from 408 respondents in Limpopo Province of South Africa, provided quantitative information. Bivariate statistical analysis was used to discern variations in responses between various occupational groups. The results indicate differentiated impacts among occupational groups, including loss of revenue, disruptions of the value chain, and welfare disruptions. Despite these challenges, the study found that some new safety measures helped the mining industry better handle the impacts of COVID-19. In conclusion, the study highlights the importance of taking proactive steps to make the mining industry more resilient. It emphasises the need for support, especially for communities that are vulnerable in times of crisis. The findings suggest that, moving forward, the mining industry should be prepared for future challenges by adopting innovative solutions and ensuring the well-being of its workers.

Departing from earlier studies, we conduct a review of studies on fuel subsidy removal in Ghana and Nigeria highlighting the influence on poverty levels, environmental and welfare implications and political economy which is dearth in the current literature. Using the Arksey and O'Malley framework, we searched for peer-reviewed articles from JSTOR, Emerald Insight, Taylor and Francis, ScienceDirect, Springer, Elsevier and Sage databases. We used keywords and Boolean logic and our search covered twenty-three years (2000–2023). Twenty-seven studies that satisfied the inclusion measures were identified and further discussed. Removal of fuel subsidies has a detrimental effect on poverty level in both countries via transportation cost. Also, removal of fuel subsidies lessens the ecological impact in these emerging economies as well as negatively influences household welfare through high cost of living. Further, removal of fuel subsidies is associated with disagreements between the citizenry and the policymakers where the latter are accused of massive corruption coupled with poor revenue collection from the implementation of the policy. Our study's results add to the discourse on fuel subsidy removal in oil-producing and emerging economies and furnish a reference point for making decisions aimed at protecting the vulnerable in society.