Barriers to local community participation in mining projects: The eroding role of power imbalance and information asymmetry

Abstract

Mining activities produce environmental, economic, and social impacts that may affect the quality of people’s lives in surrounding communities. Community participation in decisions that can affect their safety and wellbeing is essential for reducing the risks and vulnerabilities of the local population. Our research attempts to understand the critical aspects that negatively affect the development of community participation in mining projects. Moreover, since community participation is key to developing trust in company-community relations, we also investigate the impact of these critical aspects on trust, as a prerequisite to an SLO. Employing qualitative methods, this study uses a mining case to investigate the major obstacles to community participation in a local community near the areas where the two largest disasters in the history of the Brazilian mining industry had recently occurred (Brumadinho 2019; Mariana 2015). We performed large document analysis and conducted 209 on-line and in-person interviews with subgroups of local people and related actors. Our results suggest that power imbalance and information asymmetry are critical obstacles to community participation when it comes to developing mining-community relationships. This study suggests that in some cases communities have no power at all to participate in the decisions that affect their safety and wellbeing.