Lian Sinclair

Multinational mining corporations pursue their interests through social and political strategies across political scales. This chapter analyses how they have responded to social conflict and challenges to their legitimacy from people affected by mining and civil society actors. Using Rio Tinto’s ex-Kelian gold mine in Indonesia as a case study, I show how issues that began as local concerns ‘jumped scales’ when activists created alliances with national and international NGOs. In response to this and other similar cases, Rio Tinto helped establish a network of international business associations and governance standards which emphasize consultation, sustainability and stakeholder participation. Participatory mechanisms, including corporate social responsibility, community development programs and consultative committees based on international standards attempt to contain and re-localize conflict with affected communities. Together, global self-governance networks and participatory mechanisms reconstitute the legitimacy and power of mining corporations to determine their own regulatory and operating environments.

The stories have shed light on social licence contestations in WA, where both legal and political licence interplays were shown to have stymied community efforts to assert social licence claims. The examples are offered with a view to give guidance to communities and eco-activists who may see parallels between the cases detailed and their own lived experience. Cases are presented from Queensland, Mongolia and Indonesia, detailing the nature of political, legal and social licence interactions and how these have been navigated by local activists. These cases illustrate the impact of legal and political contexts on social, actuarial and political risk and licence dynamics. The legal and political environments of Queensland, Mongolia and Indonesia were all found, albeit to varying degrees, to have been restrictive concerning activists’ ability to assert their social licence concerns given the dominance of the political licence and relative weakness of the actuarial licence.