Savannah Carr-Wilson (3rd Year PhD) - UPEP
Impact-Benefit Agreements in Critical Mineral Mining: A Typology and Analysis
Date: 02/28/2025 (Fri)
Time: 2:00pm- 3:00pm
Location: This seminar will be held both on-site and remotely. The on-site location will be: Rubenstein 149- Sanford School. It will also be held remotely via Zoom. (Please sign in to see the link.)
Organizer: Alex Herrera, Paula Sarmiento and Xingchen Chen
Meeting Schedule: (Not currently open for scheduling. Please contact the seminar organizer listed above.)
All meetings will be held in the same location as the seminar unless otherwise noted.
2:00pm - Seminar Presentation (2:00pm to 3:00pm)
Additional Comments: Abstract: Global demand for critical minerals is expected to soar as countries transition to clean energy, necessitating new mines with environmental, social, and governance (ESG) impacts. Academics and policymakers warn that ESG risks and an associated lack of social license could disrupt mining, causing mineral shortages that bottleneck the energy transition. Impact-benefit agreements (IBAs) – negotiated between mining companies and local communities – deserve our attention as an emerging governance solution. IBAs can mitigate project impacts, distribute benefits, and foster social license. While prior work viewed IBAs as confidential and difficult to study, increasingly parties make agreements public. We collect a novel dataset of 29 public critical mineral mining IBAs. Building on this dataset and literature on public and private governance, we propose a typology of mining IBAs, showing that such IBAs can be characterized as private governance mechanisms, or quasi-public. We apply the typology to our dataset, and describe agreement types and their features. Our article offers researchers and policymakers a conceptual roadmap to understand the types of IBAs used in critical mineral mining and their features, supporting further empirical investigation into the role of IBAs in addressing environmental and human security impacts and building out benefits of critical mineral mining. Stage: preparing article for journal submission Feedback: all feedback welcome