The End of Eldorado? Post-Legitimation Adoption of Mining Agreements by Indigenous Communities

Abstract

Late stage adoption is receiving renewed attention in institutional theory. The varied emergent patterns of late stage adoption has led researchers to re-investigate the nature of adopted practice and the power of organizations and characteristics of fields that influence adoption. One burgeoning stream of work has been around the slowed adoption of complex yet opaque practices once their drawbacks are revealed; another is around the power of local communities as actors to resist adoption of practice advocated by more powerful, central field players. We combine these two streams of work to examine the increasing resistance to the adoption of impact benefit agreements (IBAs) and other forms of mining agreements by Indigenous Canadian communities. Event history analyses of adoptions from 1997-2019 show some alignment of material and cultural community resources with early adoption, but no evidence that such resources lead to later adoption, even though the features of mining firms – being public, Canadian, emergent – influence adoption both early and late. As a result, our paper contributes to institutional explanations of adoption and community studies of Indigenous group power.