Roles and Dynamics of State Actors and Civil Society Organizations in Company-Community Conflicts

Abstract

Drawing on resource dependency, stakeholder management, and social movement literature our study identifies how the orientation of state actors and involvement of civil society actors affect conflict intensity between mining companies and communities. We also examine how vertical and horizontal inequalities can worsen power imbalance and increase conflict intensity. By using a hand-collected multi-source dataset of 453 global mining conflicts between 2002 and 2013, we found that state actors’ pro-social orientation lowers the conflict intensity while their pro-development orientation increases the conflict intensity when combined with the involvement of civil society organizations. Findings also show that societal horizontal and vertical inequalities increase the conflict intensity when both civil society organizations and state actors are involved because inequalities will weaken collaborations among parties.