Centering Community Voices in Mining Governance

Abstract

Peru has shifted away from centralized mining management to governance among government, companies, and communities. Various mechanisms facilitate community participation, including the mining canon, dialogues, and corporate social responsibility programs. Even with these laws and mechanisms, mining pollution and conflicts continue. In this study, we ask: how do communities perceive and participate in mining governance? And what are some alternative ways, driven by community priorities, to address governance in mining contexts? We collected 53 semi-structured with agricultural actors in two Peruvian districts with mining activity and analyzed those perspectives through the lens of community-centered governance. Our analyses revealed how centering community priorities in data collection and analysis illuminates context-specific factors that shape community attitudes toward mining and highlights community-driven approaches to addressing mining governance. Such community-driven approaches could include integrating understandings of local livelihoods and historical contexts, implementing transparent participatory processes, and improving laws to give communities decision-making power over mining development.

Keywords:

• Mining dialogue community-driven development
• natural resource governance
• participation
• Peru

Acknowledgments

We thank our research participants in the districts of Caylloma and Madrigal and the Purdue University Center for the Environment.

Disclosure statement

All coauthors of this manuscript have no competing interests to declare.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Arequipa Nexus Institute for Food, Energy, Water, and the Environment provided by the Universidad Nacional de San Agustín de Arequipa.