Abstract
Mining mineral resources has been found to be an ambiguous way of achieving sustainable development. It can spark the economic development of poor regions, but at the same time it is associated with severe sustainability issues, particularly in areas with governance deficits. Recent developments have spurred a vibrant debate on how to achieve the development opportunities while minimizing the sustainability impacts. As a result, voluntary multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSI) originated with differing foci, aims, and organizational designs. Such MSIs for responsible mining can be interpreted as a social innovation from two perspectives: (1) stakeholder groups cooperate to complement, concretize, initiate, and prepare, but also compete with other forms of governance and possibly replace them; (2) the MSIs support implementing responsible mining in practice. A structured review of 20 MSIs’ documents along an analytical framework covering governance, change in practice, and diffusion shows that the two roles of MSIs can hardly be separated, as the change in practice is enabled via a change in governance. Moreover, the MSIs are found to be a valuable complement to traditional governance of responsible mining, as they transcend national borders, allow for the inclusion of informal miners into professionalization, and offer support to companies to enhance their sustainability performance. Nevertheless, the MSIs are voluntary and relatively young. This limits their power and requires further research for which six avenues are identified in this paper.
Highlights
Mining mineral resources has traditionally been a foundation for the creation of wealth and progress, but this has increasingly shifted away from mining
The distribution of the 20 multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSI) across these three characteristics is displayed in Table 2, which adopts the supplier coverage as lead-dimension along which the distribution of the other two dimensions is oriented to provide an overview of the reviewed MSIs for responsible mining
This study set out to answer the question of how MSIs for responsible mining foster social innovations
Summary
Mining mineral resources has traditionally been a foundation for the creation of wealth and progress, but this has increasingly shifted away from mining. At the same time, mining operations are highly detrimental for the environment and associated with severe social impacts such as those upon the health and welfare of workers [1,2] To date, such impacts are addressed by means of governance and innovation approaches, that contributed each to substantially reducing the negative sustainability impact of mining and moved the sector to higher responsibility. We argue that two core governance and innovation approaches can be distinguished: first, the common and widely established approach with governmental authorities as key actors and law as key instrument, that is the authority-based approach; second, a more recent approach building on voluntary multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs), here termed the MSI-based approach [5,6] The latter is considered as a social innovation: It contributes in an innovative way to improving the social situation of people and communities involved in mining. It makes use—by integrating several groups of stakeholders—of a new social approach, which allows sustainability issues to be tackled outside the reach of traditional approaches [6], such as the authority-based one
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