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.

Since the 1990s, participation has become the dominant method for multinational mining corporations to contain conflict with people affected by mining. Yet conflict, including violent confrontation, remains prevalent. The literature documents a wide range of outcomes of participatory mechanisms – they may produce compromise, exacerbate conflict or even create new opportunities for conflict – yet there is little literature explaining such variance. This thesis explains this diversity in terms of (a) factors involved in the design and implementation of participatory mechanisms by multinational miners and (b) factors determining how, when and why people affected by mining participate or not. I use the ‘modes of participation’ framework to analyse how institutional and ideological foundations for participation shape who can participate, on what issues and when. I argue that participatory mechanisms including corporate social responsibility (CSR) and community development are neither simple outcomes of corporate ethics nor merely greenwashing strategies, as they are often presented. Rather, participation is a mechanism of rule to both contain manifestations of conflict risky to corporate profitability and create social relations amenable to extractive accumulation.

Qualitative data are drawn from fieldwork across three case studies in Indonesia – the proposed coastal Kulon Progo sand iron mine in Yogyakarta, Newcrest’s Gosowong gold mine in North Maluku and Rio Tinto’s ex-Kelian gold mine in East Kalimantan. These cases are placed within an analysis of global corporate self-governance that has arisen in response to broader crises of legitimacy. Findings highlight the importance of historically constituted social relations and contestation across local and global scales in shaping participation. Particularly important for how people affected by mining participate are their control of land, histories of organisation, alliance structures and ideologies. These factors shape the desire and capacity of people affected by mining to resist or secure benefits from participation in mining developments.

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.

The 'common sense' view of Australian foreign policy in the South Pacific is that it is aimed at securing a stable and friendly near neighbourhood for Australia. Contrary to this view, this thesis argues that Australian foreign policy in the South Pacific is based upon an ideology of institutional neo-liberalism and is therefore mostly concerned with transforming governance structures within and around states in line with neo-liberal models of statehood. The Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI) is an Australian-led intervention and state-building initiative designed in response to the violence experienced in the Solomon Islands from 1998 to 2001 and the following years of state bankruptcy and criminality that plagued the South Pacific state. RAMSI has been commonly represented as a success story of international interventionism and state-building, however, I will argue that this representation is seriously flawed because of fundamental oversights in two key aspects of the intervention, caused by RAMSI’s ideological underpinnings. Firstly, causes of instability and violence in the Solomon Islands are reduced to ethnic conflict, poor governance and slow economic growth, while political and historical causes are ignored or seen as secondary. Therefore the central 'solutions' to the 'failure' of the state revolve around the implementation of 'good governance' and private sector led economic growth, whilst long standing grievances are ignored. Secondly, RAMSI is replicating, or even exacerbating, many of the same political-economic conditions that led to the violent conflict to which it is responding. The implications of this argument are that Australian foreign policy in the South Pacific is actually undermining its stated objective of promoting stability.