Lian Sinclair

The global energy transition is disrupting old industries needing to decarbonise. Meanwhile, resource-rich countries stand to benefit from the rush for ‘energy-transition minerals’. Here, institutional investors and governments promote climate policies compatible with natural resource extraction. This begs the question: How have extractive conglomerates reorganised their interests to benefit from the energy transition? Focusing on the nickel extraction to lithium battery to EV industry in Indonesia, this article contends that the intersection of decarbonisation, developmentalism, and resource nationalism offer extractive capital an ‘EV-fix’ for declining legitimacy. This is more than an ideological shift, as new alliances of state capital, domestic conglomerates, politicians and international battery and EV manufacturers are forged under a ‘green development-resource nationalist nexus’.

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.

Mining developments, corporate-community conflict, and participatory community development programs can have diverse gendered impacts on people affected by mining. Thus, changing gendered relations are amongst the social, economic, and political legacies of mining. Despite growing literature on the gendered impacts of mining, little explains how and why particular developments produce divergent legacies. This paper builds on feminist understandings of primitive accumulation and social reproduction theory to understand the rapid economic, social and political change that reconfigures gendered relations between and within groups of men and women. Drawing on research across three case studies in Indonesia, I argue that while mining developments can disproportionately disadvantage women, resistance work and participation in corporate social responsibility programs (CSR) may be empowering. This paper thus moves beyond the ‘women-as-victims’ approach to uncover the social, economic, and political foundations of inequality that may be disrupted or reinforced by mining, participation and resistance. The implications of this for mining governance policy, CSR and NGOs are that gendered legacies of mining depend on how resistance or participation create opportunities to overcome structural inequalities exacerbated by mining.

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.