Abstract

The governance of company-local community relationships is today central to understanding the political consequences of mines - the distribution of their benefits and harms, and their patterns of political and economic marginalization. To manage these consequences and mitigate serious conflicts that might arise as a result, policymakers have recently promoted decentralized and multi-stakeholder governance of this relationship, emphasizing direct dialogue between local stakeholders and companies to produce political and procedural norms that counter communities’ political marginalization.
 
This pilot ethnographic research asks: how important are existing background webs of subnational political power in determining those norms? It focuses on the role of understudied actors – regional development banks and subnational administrative bodies - in politically structuring the process and substance of that dialogue.