Charles Roche

Mining has contributed to human development and technological prowess over several millennia. Accompanying this practical contribution has been a growing set of interrelated impacts that society has slowly began to acknowledge. The accumulation of externalities—or impacts on people and planet—are referred to as mining legacies, denoting both current and long-lived outcomes, ranging from pollution to community fragmentation to intergenerational embodiment. Mining legacies have origins, causes and impacts in both the physical process of mining and the industry's complex role in society, where it has been integral to colonial expansion, imperialism and global capitalism. This synthesis of the special issue Mining Legacies: Still breaking new ground explores the concept of mining legacies as a term capable of capturing a more expansive understanding of interrelated and complex impacts on society, where heterogeneous modes of existence clash with the dominant Western mining paradigm and global, capitalist development. Articulating a mining legacy lens contributes to orthodox debates on mining policy and managing specific impacts, while also challenging understandings of the underlying values, potential benefits, and externalities of extractive-led development. This synthesis also offers deeper insights into community agency and resistance as well as wellbeing and governance, also offering up possibilities for transforming negative legacies.

From an instrumental or management perspective, impact assessment (IA) is a process of identifying impacts, finding solutions and achieving project approval. A recipient community, however, has a completely different perspective. For them the IA is about living with impacts, individually and collectively, perhaps over generations, and contested processes of self-determination, consultation and exclusion. IA practitioners live in a third space, usually bound to the proponent but also aware of responsibilities to communities and eco-systems. Seeking to better understand how IA is practiced and experienced, we explore the proposed Wafi-Golpu mine, located in the Morobe Province of Papua New Guinea. Determinably focused on local effects we situate the proposed mine within the context of the national mining experience and discuss how IA practices see local and/or Indigenous communities. We find that the Wafi-Golpu IA is blind to local ways of being and seeing the world, with an opaque and arbitrary assessment that reflects its technical and Western basis and bias. We finish with observations about the proposed Wafi-Golpu mine and IA that is relevant to the approval process, as well as making a decolonial, Southern contribution to IA theory and practice, extractive industry regulation and mining-affected communities elsewhere.

This article presents stories of life from Venembeli, a remote village in the hinterlands of Papua New Guinea. Caught up in a contentious mining development, villagers both long for and fear the development promised by global capitalism. But with a forty year development history, the proposed Wafi-Golpu mine has become the only lens through which the present or future is imagined and understood. We contend that this cultural hegemony has twisted the way stakeholders understand the mine's outcomes and impacts. Mindful of the power of language and dominant cultures, we adopt a refined version of the Melanesian tok stori methodology to capture stories that, together with illustrations and our own observations, make visible and amplify the stories from Venembeli. The stories illustrate a different reality to those presented in the usual western, technical and reductive impact assessments; offering insights into a complex human story that requires contemplation and empathy if the communities are to be valued, heard and respected. The outcome of telling these stories is uncertain, but this emancipatory participatory action research will help readers and stakeholders to better understand the community, and to prioritise their human flourishing to ensure positive, rather than negative mining legacies.

Mining is often portrayed as a contributor to sustainable development, especially so in developing countries such as Papua New Guinea (PNG). Since 1970, several large mines have been developed in PNG (e.g. Panguna, Ok Tedi, Porgera, Lihir, Ramu) but always with controversial environmental standards and social impacts often overlooked or ignored. In PNG, mine wastes are approved to be discharged to rivers or oceans on a very large scale, leading to widespread environmental and social impacts – to the point of civil war in the case of Panguna. The intimate links between indigenous communities and their environment have invariably been under-estimated or ignored, leading many to question mining's role in PNG's development. Here, we review the geology of PNG, its mineral resources, mining history, key trends for grades and resources, environmental metrics (water, energy, carbon), mine waste management, and regulatory and governance issues. The study provides a unique and comprehensive insight into the sustainable development contribution of the mining industry in PNG – especially the controversial practices of riverine and marine mine waste disposal. The history of mining is a complex story of the links between the anthroposphere, biosphere, hydrosphere and geosphere. Ultimately, this study demonstrates that the scale of environmental and social impacts and risks are clearly related to the vast scale of mine wastes – a fact which remains been poorly recognised. For PNG, the promise of mining-led development remains elusive to many communities and they are invariably left with significant social and environmental legacies which will last for decades to centuries (e.g. mine waste impacts on water resources). Most recently, the PNG government has moved to ban riverine tailings disposal for future projects and encourage greater transparency and accountability by the mining sector, including its interactions with communities. There remains hope for better outcomes in the future.

The gap between the rhetoric and reality of extractive-led development (ELD) looms large over the dominant but flawed discourse of mining for development. Seeking to better understand outcomes from ELD we apply a human flourishing perspective, exploring yet-to-be-experienced impacts in a potentially inflammatory political process. This action research is designed to assist communities respond to the proposed, but yet to be approved Wafi-Golpu project in the Morobe Province of Papua New Guinea. The research exchange documents with a clear voice community concerns about: a lack of information; anxiety about intentional and immanent impacts; fundamentally different conceptualisations of what human flourishing is; a lack of development, services and facilities; unrealistic expectations; and, most powerfully, an undermining of individual and collective agency. We find that despite forty years of waiting for mining, the consent process to date is unjust, flawed and inadequate, de-legitimising any future claims to informed consent. While the immediate practical, on-ground outcomes of this action-research for the communities has been positive, longer term outcomes are yet to be determined. The concept of human flourishing offers a useful and insightful perspective that can inform communities, governments, proponents and researchers alike about the potential impacts of ELD on human well-being.

Inspired by questions from local communities about the potential impacts of large-scale extractive activities, we used others’ experience to identify and illustrate intentional and immanent impacts from extractive led development (ELD). Recognising the capitalist driver of global extraction and needing to capture the harsh, but often obscured reality of local experience, we turned to theories, applications and experience of dispossession. Based on Holden, Nadeau and Jacobson’s (2011) application of Harvey’s (2003) theory of accumulation by dispossession (AbD) in the Philippines, we identified eleven separate but interrelated and overlapping factors of extractive dispossession which provide the specific detail required to identify and understand extractive impacts. These were then discussed and tested with communities potentially impacted by the proposed Wafi-Golpu mine in the Morobe province of Papua New Guinea. Participant responses indicated the value and utility of this recipient-view perspective of extractive impact in an interactive and iterative approach that informed communities about potential impacts and documented their concerns with process and outcome at Wafi-Golpu - which is already a site of multiple dispossessions. The research outcome is a practical heuristic with specific factors that enhances our understanding of potential impacts from ELD and can assist in applying concepts of dispossession and accumulation to development impacts.