Contested terrain: mining and the environment

Abstract

This review critically surveys an extensive literature on mining, development, and environment. It identifies a significant broadening over time in the scope of the environment question as it relates to mining, from concerns about landscape aesthetics and pollution to ecosystem health, sustainable development, and indigenous rights. A typology compares and contrasts four distinctive approaches to this question: (a) technology and management-centered accounts, defining the issue in terms of environmental performance; (b) public policy studies on the design of effective institutions for capturing benefits and allocating costs of resource development; (c) structural political economy, highlighting themes of external control, resource rights, and environmental justice; and (d) cultural studies, which illustrate how mining exemplifies many of society's anxieties about the social and environmental effects of industrialization and globalization. Each approach is examined in detail.