Digital innovations have become increasingly widespread in almost every industry, and Australia’s energy sector has not been immune to this. It therefore follows that the coordination of energy exports like liquified natural gas (LNG) across government, industry, and community stakeholders will be largely dependent on the ability of these constituents to share digital information between and among each other in useful timeframes. However, the success of these integrated data systems will hinge on the ability of the energy sector’s workforce to use these technologies effectively, but it is increasingly coming into focus that the industry’s workers have very uneven levels of proficiency with digital technologies. By synthesizing earlier digital skills frameworks from other industries and adding qualitative evidence distilled from 42 interviews with a broad range of employees throughout a midsize Australian LNG company, this paper puts forward a digital skills framework for the energy sector which identifies five skill areas that will be required in 2030: (1) data analytics, (2) digital communication and collaboration, (3) digital security, (4) digital ethical and social responsibility, and (5) digital innovation. The required level of proficiency that will be required in 2030 for each of these skill areas is then assessed for different discipline groups throughout the industry. We conclude by explaining how the presented framework can be used as an assessment tool for identifying skill gaps throughout the energy sector, and exploring the policy-related implications of the findings.
Data centres have moved from the background of the digital economy to the foreground of energy, climate, industrial and national-security politics. Artificial intelligence is intensifying this shift through growing demand for compute, electricity, cooling, land, hardware and critical materials. Yet governance remains largely organised around facility-level metrics that treat data centres as bounded technical assets rather than strategic infrastructure embedded in grids, water systems, supply chains, communities and security architectures. This article develops the CLOUDS framework—Coherence, Lifecycle materiality, Operational locality, Utility burden, Digital sovereignty, and Social licence and public purpose—as a diagnostic architecture for evaluating data centres as system-shaping infrastructure. It also develops capacity extraction: the process through which heterogeneous inputs such as electricity, water, land, permits, institutional trust and community tolerance are rendered as a single quantity called capacity and converted into compute whose higher-value layers may remain controlled elsewhere. The framework is developed through an integrative review and tiered empirical design spanning Chile, Australia, Querétaro, Ireland and Singapore. It is proposed for testing rather than presented as validated. Two findings are central. First, instrument incoherence can arise without regulatory capture when no institution can govern trade-offs across electricity, water, planning and public value. Second, hosting is not sovereignty: physical location alone creates no assured claim on compute access, workload priority, crisis continuity or higher-value layers. The policy implication is strategic infrastructure bargaining over both system capacity and the institutions governing its conversion into compute.
Artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) is often explained through weak regulation, illegality, poverty or failed formalisation. These explanations are necessary but incomplete because they do not show how extraction is governed once mining begins. Drawing on fifty semi-structured interviews conducted between July and December 2025 across the Ijesha gold axis and relevant state, commercial and federal governance sites in Osogbo, Lagos and Abuja, this article examines artisanal gold mining in Southwestern Nigeria as an extractive-governance order. Nigeria’s legal framework vests mineral ownership and control in the federal state, yet practical control is distributed among landholding families, traditional authorities, sponsors, pit organisers, labour networks, security-linked intermediaries, buyers and commodity-chain actors. The article develops the concept of informal empires to describe durable configurations in which actors accumulate governing capacity by connecting several sovereign functions across an extractive chain: territorial access, production finance, labour organisation, protection, enforcement insulation and commodity circulation. Unlike concepts that primarily establish the plurality of public authority, informal empires foreground functional accumulation, chain-wide reach and asymmetrical exposure to sanction. The findings show that formal mineral sovereignty remains legally centralised while the practical work of governing extraction is dispersed. Formalisation policies focused only on miners and licences therefore miss the actors who open land, finance pits, organise protection, allocate enforcement risk and absorb gold into markets. The article contributes to debates on ASM, public authority, commodity chains and extractive governance by showing how economic control becomes a durable form of practical rule.
Over the past two decades, amid repeated socio-environmental conflicts, mining in Peru and Chile has been rearticulated as environmentally responsible and indispensable to the global Green Energy Transition. This article examines how the resilience of extractivism is built and renewed under conditions that should instead constrain it. It argues that in Chile and Peru, two of the world's leading copper exporters, economic elites, in alliance with the state, systematically translate moments of crisis into revised discursive strategies, governance adjustments, and territorial interventions that secure accumulation across conjunctures. To trace these mechanisms, the article introduces Discursive Geographies of Extraction (DGE), an approach that bridges Cultural Political Economy and Latin American critical geography. DGE centers territory as the site where abstract imaginaries and governance arrangements acquire material durability, harder to reverse than the discourse or the law that authorized them. Methodologically, it combines critical discourse analysis of mining business associations’ reports and media coverage with policy analysis, interviews, and event observation. It examines four conflicts: Conga and Pascua Lama during the commodity boom of 2003-2013, and Las Bambas and Los Bronces Integrado during the post-boom period of 2014-2024. Across these sites, crises function as generative junctures through which developmentalist narratives are reformulated into green and sustainability-oriented economic imaginaries, environmental governance is recalibrated, and productive territories are materially produced. The article shows how socio-territorial conflicts, understood as responses to capitalist contradictions in copper extraction, shape the terms of extractivism’s reconfiguration, and how extractive industries adapt and shape contemporary green capitalism in Latin America.
Military interventions are increasingly used to regulate informal small-scale mining in mineral-rich countries, yet their socioeconomic and health consequences remain insufficiently understood. This study examines the unintended impacts of militarized enforcement on informal mining-dependent communities, with emphasis on livelihoods, household dynamics, and well-being. A qualitative exploratory design was employed, drawing on semi-structured interviews with 74 informal miners across three rural communities in northern Ghana. Thematic analysis was used to examine lived experiences of military interventions and their effects on rural livelihood systems. The findings reveal six interconnected impacts including livelihood losses and indebtedness, reduced agricultural activity, fatalities and injuries, long-term psychological distress, family separation and household disintegration, and forced migration. These outcomes are mutually reinforcing and reflect a broader livelihood system shock in which enforcement actions disrupt interconnected economic and social structures. The destruction of mining assets undermines both mining and agriculture, while repeated raids generate fear, psychological strain, and adaptive mobility. Women and auxiliary actors experience indirect but significant economic exclusion. To interpret these dynamics, the study develops the Militarized Livelihood Disruption Framework (MLDF) which explains how enforcement actions cascade across economic, social, and health domains in vulnerable mining communities. The study concludes that militarized enforcement is misaligned with rural livelihood realities and calls for integrated, livelihood-sensitive governance approaches that extend beyond coercive regulation.
As many mining operations in Australia approach the end of their productive life cycles, Aboriginal communities located on or near mining sites are increasingly seeking alternative economic pathways that align with their values, priorities, and connections to Country. Indigenous tourism is frequently identified as a promising post-mining opportunity; however, the extent to which mine closure policy enables such transitions remains unclear. This study examines mine closure policy as articulated through legislative, regulatory and industry documents in supporting Indigenous-led tourism development in post-mining contexts. Applying a decolonisation lens, the study draws on Barnett and Duvall’s taxonomy of power to undertake a qualitative analysis of the policy documents relevant to mining on recognised Indigenous land, with a particular focus on the Northern Territory. The findings of this study reveal that while Indigenous participation in mine closure planning is increasingly acknowledged within governance frameworks, decision-making authority over post-mining land use remains concentrated with the state and territory governments and mining companies. Mine closure governance is dominated by technocratic, biophysical priorities, with limited institutional mechanisms to embed Indigenous aspirations, measurements of success, or alternative economic pathways such as tourism. Indigenous agency emerges as conditional and procedurally constrained, rather than structurally embedded. The study concludes that current mine closure policy frameworks arguably facilitate colonial power relations that limit Indigenous self-determination in post-mining transitions. Addressing these constraints requires policy reform that moves beyond consultation toward genuine redistribution of authority over post-mining land use and economic futures.
Large-scale mining is expanding across Alaska, particularly in regions where nearby communities maintain deep relationships with the land. While existing research emphasizes physical health risks—such as exposure to mine dust and contamination of air and water—far less is known about the mental health consequences for individuals residing in surrounding communities. This study employed a qualitative thematic analysis to examine the lived experiences of 19 individuals residing near operating large-scale mines in Alaska’s Interior region. Semi-structured qualitative interviews reflected four themes that provided valuable insight on the relationship between large-scale mining and the mental health of individuals residing in nearby communities: changes to the environment, distrust in mining industries and political systems, economic and infrastructure tradeoffs, and identified mental health impacts. These results highlight the need for mental health considerations in the permitting of mining projects and in land management policies in Alaska and in future research.
This article employs nodal governance theory to analyze security governance in the DRC's Copperbelt, where nodes such as state forces and corporate security interact with local communities and artisanal miners. Drawing on a triangulated dataset of 230 security incidents documented between 2018 and 2026 - comprising international monitoring platforms, media reports, NGO publications, and primary-source contacts - supplemented by 33 semi-structured interviews with civil society actors, artisanal miners, cooperative leaders, and corporate security agents, we find that artisanal miners and communities bear a disproportionate burden—a pattern we interpret as the structural outcome of nodal contestation. Nodal governance materializes in concrete security practices—trenches, mixed patrols, guard dogs and produces a violent form of nodal governance - hybrid coercion – as well as resistance. . The study advances debates on plural policing in resource conflicts by showing that violence is not a symptom of state absence but the product of an active, contested security governance.
Coal regions face an increasingly uncertain transition landscape as decarbonization priorities, policy volatility, and local fiscal dependencies converge. Rather than following a uniform path, regional transitions diverge along distinct structural and institutional axes. This paper advances a Multi-level Regional Transition Framework to situate how local stakeholders navigate evolutionary tension—forces of economic change and entrenched continuity. Combining Q-methodology and semi-structured interviews with 60 stakeholders across Eastern Pennsylvania, Southeastern British Columbia, and Southeastern Montana, we identify two predominant transition rationales: Environmental Orientation and Coal Utilization. Comparative findings show three distinct transition archetypes: Eastern Pennsylvania: Structural economic diversification supports gradual, post-coal industrial reconfiguration; Southern British Columbia: Stable decarbonization policy supports environmentally oriented diversification, moderated by a policy-export paradox associated with metallurgical coal; and Southeastern Montana: Substantial fiscal and social dependence on coal favors incremental adaptation centered on coal asset preservation. Based on these findings we argue that regional pathways are shaped by four interacting drivers: transition maturity, policy stability, economic buffering (including fiscal reliance), and socio-cultural/perceptual path dependency. We demonstrate that regions are not passive recipients of macro policy. Instead, unbuffered fiscal drag and local path dependencies can spur resistance that aggregates upward, creating recursive feedback loops which actively destabilize macro-level policy continuity. Consequently, durable transition strategies should look beyond targets and align decarbonization with local capabilities, fiscal realities and community agency.
Heavy mineral sands mining has been promoted as a cornerstone of Mozambique’s development strategy, promising employment, infrastructure, and improved living conditions for host communities. Drawing on five months of qualitative fieldwork (2022–2023) in a mining-affected community in southern Mozambique, this article examines who benefits from heavy sands mining and who does not, and why. Combining intersectional feminist political ecology and geography with elements of the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach, we analyse how a heavy sands mine and associated resettlement reshaped diverse actors’ livelihood assets and opportunities. We show that material gains such as brick housing, electricity and piped water coexisted with substantial loss of land, fruit trees and autonomy, alongside intensified labour burdens, precarious employment trajectories, and widespread perceptions of broken promises and state–company collusion. These outcomes were patterned by intersecting social positions, especially gender, age, marital status and access to wage labour, producing uneven capacities to cope, adapt and claim benefits. Beyond measurable assets, land and trees emerged as place-based anchors of identity, social relations and cultural life, revealing the limits of technocratic livelihood restoration and resilience narratives that depoliticize responsibility. The findings complicate notions of ‘community acceptance’ and ‘social license to operate’ by highlighting fragmented legitimacy and trust shaped by opaque communication, unilateral compensation changes, and exclusionary engagement. We conclude that extractive governance and impact assessment must move beyond homogenizing ‘community’ frames toward transparent, differentiated and place-sensitive restitution and accountability mechanisms that address temporal, relational and non-material dimensions of loss.
Open-pit coal mining causes severe landscape degradation and socio-economic risks, and without proper reclamation, abandoned sites often form ghost habitats after mine closure. Although post-mining land use (PMLU) seeks restoration, stakeholders often prefer returning land to paddy fields, which is difficult under regulatory uncertainty and conflicting interests. Prior research has treated technical reclamation and stakeholder engagement as separate fields, and little is known about how to integrate them into a strategy for productive, community-usable land. This study addresses the gap by identifying a nexus-based post-mining strategy that integrates water, land, energy and vegetation systems with governance legitimacy and stakeholder collaboration. Through a qualitative single case study at an open-pit coal mining company in East Kalimantan, we interviewed twelve informants comprising four government officials, three company staff and five members of local farming communities. The results show that the nexus approach combines technical and socio-economic integration, with yields of 4 to 5 tonnes of unhulled rice per hectare, while outcomes remain bounded by document-based supervision, uneven communication, unresolved land tenure and post-closure financing. The findings suggest that a nexus-based approach can move post-mining land beyond regulatory compliance towards productive use, and they specify the governance conditions under which the approach might transfer to comparable coal mining contexts.
This paper examines women’s roles in artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) and the factors underpinning their continued participation despite persistent economic, social, health, and reproductive challenges. Drawing on ethnographic evidence from ASM communities in southwestern Ghana, the study shows that women’s engagement in the sector is shaped by resilience, agency, and capability, particularly in relation to livelihood survival and the wellbeing and future prospects of their children. The findings demonstrate that prevailing explanations centered on economic survival and household responsibilities are insufficient to capture women’s lived realities in ASM. Instead, the study conceptualizes their experiences as a quadruple burden, reflecting women’s simultaneous exposure to economic precarity, social obligations, health and safety risks, and reproductive responsibilities. The paper introduces the Resilience-Mediated Quadruple Burden Framework, which illustrates the dynamic interactions between the drivers of women’s participation, the layered constraints they face, and the adaptive strategies they employ to sustain their livelihoods. This framework advances scholarship by moving beyond survival narratives and highlighting women’s resilience and adaptive capacities within structurally constrained mining environments.
Investigative journalism can improve social and environmental outcomes for extractive projects by exposing governance failures and information asymmetries. This paper offers a replicable methodological template for extractives coverage by reverse-engineering thirteen published investigations into oil and mining projects in Canada, Brazil, Guyana, and Ecuador. Many journalists already combine ground-truth interviews with primary records. Our contribution is to codify how that combination operates across jurisdictions and to translate it into a research design template for scholars, NGOs, and transparency advocates. The analysis draws on 77 original interviews and 63 primary records, examined through systematic qualitative content analysis with thematic synthesis. We also explicitly defend the autoethnographic dimension of the study, in which one author reflexively analyzes their own published reporting. We link journalistic sourcing strategies including field-based testimony, access-to-information releases, court filings, corporate registries, and regulatory data to extractives scholarship on transparency and governance. Journalism methods, we argue, can serve as a research methodology for resource governance inquiry.
What determines the location of extractive foreign direct investment, and do different investors respond to host-country conditions in the same way? We examine Chinese and American investments in Latin America's extractive sector between 2000 and 2010, a period in which China emerged as a major investor while US firms made few new commitments, using the US case as a comparative benchmark. We conceptualize institutional distance along three dimensions (judicial independence, corruption, and enforcement predictability) and test whether these dimensions differentially affect investments from state-backed Chinese enterprises versus private US firms. The analysis is organized around three predictions: resource abundance drives both investor types, Chinese investors are less sensitive to political and institutional risks, and left-wing governments attract Chinese but deter American investment. Using a panel of 18 Latin American countries, we find that resource abundance drives investment from China but not from the US, while institutional distance shapes entry patterns in opposing directions. Corruption distance is negatively associated with Chinese investment: Chinese firms are less likely to enter clean and transparent environments that differ sharply from China’s institutional setting. In contrast, judicial independence distance is positively associated with Chinese capital, suggesting that the protective benefits of strong courts may outweigh the costs of adapting to unfamiliar legal institutions. Electoral uncertainty and government ideology have no robust effects. The scarcity of American extractive entries is a substantive result, consistent with a higher sensitivity to political and contractual risks. Our findings indicate that institutional distance is not a unitary concept; its components operate through different mechanisms, and aggregate indices obscure these differences.
Mining heritage tourism in China has developed within a complex administrative ecosystem shaped more by policy evolution than by market demand or coordinated tourism planning. This study examines how institutional layering, fragmented authority, and shifting policy mandates within the national mining park system have unintentionally created the conditions under which mining heritage tourism emerges and evolves. Drawing on a multi-scalar policy analysis and comparative case studies, we identify two distinct development trajectories: recreational parks centred on ecological restoration and public service provision, and experiential parks that leverage industrial systems for immersive, commercially oriented experiences. These models illustrate how local governments navigate regulatory ambiguity and rigid timelines to craft context-specific tourism strategies. To bridge the gap between central policy design and local execution, we propose four interconnected strategic pathways for sustainable development: optimizing strategic spatial positioning within regional circuits, deepening interpretive capacity through museum development, enhancing multifunctionality while preserving authenticity, and leveraging heritage for place branding and post-industrial transformation. The study contributes to novel theoretical insights into the interplay between administrative intent, institutional friction, and grounded, site-level execution in transitional post-industrial landscapes.
Perpetual care planning has emerged as a critical framework for managing mining legacies where residual risks such as contaminated water, tailings, and toxic wastes persist indefinitely. This paper examines the conceptual foundations, regulatory drivers, and governance challenges of perpetual care planning in mine closure, drawing on a critical review of the ongoing closure of the Giant Mine site (NWT, Canada). This perspective demonstrates that while technical remediation and financial assurance mechanisms are essential, they are insufficient to ensure sustainable long term stewardship. The Giant Mine case illustrates how reliance on perpetual containment strategies, institutional uncertainty, and unresolved Indigenous and community concerns can undermine confidence in closure outcomes. In contrast, experiences at Elliot Lake and Red Dog highlight the necessity of adaptive management, conservative financial assurance, and durable governance arrangements. Building on these findings, the paper advances recommendations for supporting Indigenous leadership in perpetual care, grounded in stewardship-based land governance. Integrating Indigenous knowledge systems, co-governance structures, and intergenerational ethical frameworks is argued to be central to achieving legitimate, resilient, and socially just perpetual care in mine closure.
This paper contrasts the strategies employed by Western mining firms—operating under a financialised regime of accumulation—with China’s state-backed approach to securing global mineral resources. Specifically, I examine how Western gold capitalist firms’ prioritisation of shareholder returns and profit maximisation constrains their ability to sustain long-term commitment to mineral production, assume elevated geopolitical risks, and internalise and adapt to shifting operational costs in host countries throughout commodity price cycles. In contrast, Chinese firms’ sustained, state-backed investment and infrastructural development ‘beyond the mine’ has enabled its rapid ascent as a pivotal actor in global gold markets, taking an integrated approach to securing minerals crucial to its national interest, including those historically outside its productive control. The study illuminates a landscape of both opportunity and constraint, one in which the divergent pressures on Western and Chinese firms have paradoxically generated space for cross-border cooperation, especially where projects are less entangled in national-security considerations (e.g. gold projects that do not contain Western-designated critical minerals as co- or by-products). Understanding the contrasting logics—and complementarities—of Western and Chinese resource strategies is crucial, as these carry consequences for productive capacity, the distribution of risks and value, and the conditions under which extraction is rendered viable over the long term.
Illegal artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM/galamsey) is increasingly expanding into conservation landscapes in Ghana, creating challenges for biodiversity protection and community-based natural resource governance. Guided by common-pool resource theory, political ecology, and the theory of access, this study examines the emergence of illegal mining within the Wechiau Community Hippo Sanctuary Community Resource Management Area (CREMA) core zone along the Black Volta River corridor in northern Ghana. Using qualitative data from focus group discussions, key informant interviews, transect walks, and photographic documentation, the study investigates how illegal extraction affects conservation objectives, local governance systems, and community responses. The findings reveal that illegal ASGM activities have surfaced in restricted conservation areas through river-based dredging operations, floating platforms, pumping systems, and associated mining infrastructure. These activities have contributed to visible environmental changes, including water discoloration, sedimentation, and riverbank disturbance, while posing risks to hippopotamus habitats and biodiversity conservation. The findings further show that illegal mining persists because formal conservation rules are challenged by enforcement limitations, economic incentives, and competing claims to access. Although local conservation actors have undertaken actions to address mining activities, sustained protection requires stronger collaboration among communities, traditional authorities, conservation institutions, and regulatory agencies. The study contributes to debates on community-based conservation by demonstrating how extractive pressures reshape protected landscapes and highlighting the need for adaptive governance approaches that balance conservation priorities with livelihood realities.
