This chapter explores the complex relationship between extractive industries, sustainable development, and Indigenous treaty law. It begins by examining the international law guidance available for extractive industries, analysing frameworks and principles that promote responsible and sustainable practices in resource extraction while considering the social, economic, and environmental dimensions. This chapter then focuses on the specific challenges of oil and gas exploration, highlighting the impacts on Indigenous communities and emphasizing the importance of meaningful consultation, consent, and fair benefit-sharing in alignment with Indigenous treaty rights. Furthermore, it explores the mining sector’s implications for sustainable development, considering the social, economic, and environmental aspects and emphasizing the role of Indigenous treaty law in ensuring responsible practices, equitable resource distribution, and the protection of Indigenous rights and lands. Thus, the chapter emphasizes the need for a balanced approach that respects Indigenous rights, integrates Indigenous perspectives and consent, and promotes sustainable practices.

This book concludes with this Afterword that emphasizes the critical importance of integrating Indigenous knowledge and treaties into the framework of sustainable development. This chapter summarizes the conclusions we have brought forth throughout this volume and is centred on the wisdom and practices of Indigenous peoples that promote respect, reciprocity, and harmony with the natural world. The convergence of Indigenous knowledge with global sustainable development agendas is now widely recognized as a crucial step towards a more balanced and resilient future. As the world faces unprecedented challenges such as natural disasters, resource scarcity, and human rights violations, recognizing the strengths of diverse worldviews becomes essential. By examining case studies and comparative legal research, this book demonstrates the potential of treaties to foster sustainable futures that benefit all living beings.

This chapter explores processes of legalisation in the context of multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) in extractive industries. It analyses three major regimes: the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS), launched in 2002 to curb the trade in conflict diamonds; the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), a global standard promoting accountability in natural resource governance; and the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights (VPs), adopted in 2000 to address abuses by private security forces protecting corporate assets. These initiatives display a distinctive focus on implementation. Participants may receive substantial guidance and support to assist with compliance. State and non-state actors contribute to the production of guidelines, toolkits and performance indicators designed to assist corporations in rule implementation on the ground and in specific contexts. When violations occur, members may support the offending party in implementing reforms before resorting to sanctions.

Gold mines in Kyrgyzstan that are owned and operated by Chinese investors have experienced several problems in recent years, chief among them being labor disputes with local workers. These disputes mark a pattern of dysfunction in one of Kyrgyzstan’s most critical industries. They are further significant for a number of additional reasons. First, they shine a light on the realities of doing business in a controversial sector in a developing country. Second, they demonstrate labor issues from the host state side, specifically the difficulties of finding decent work for Kyrgyz laborers, and how certain industries may thereby engage in predatory practices. Third, they show the ineffectiveness of government intervention. This case study will expose readers to the causes of the problem and encourage them to critically assess the responses of various stakeholders to the disputes and the extent to which different fields and concepts of governance may be applicable in addressing the problems. These fields and concepts range from corporate social responsibility (CSR) and environmental, social and governance (ESG) to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the “Green Silk Road.”

Many suburban and urban residents spend little time contemplating where their food and energy come from. This chapter begins with the author’s introduction to West Virginia – coal country – in all its complexity. That complexity includes regional domination by fossil fuel interests, environmental and economic degradation, and political conflict, intermingled with the region’s uniquely appealing cultural traditions, natural amenities, and local efforts to fight for a better future, including through labor uprisings, law clinics, and savvy politics. West Virginia serves as an entry point for the book’s broader analysis of the half-truths often told about rural communities generally to justify extraction of rural natural resources for urban consumption. The analytical lens of law and political economy is introduced as the book’s tool to debunk myths about rural communities. Centrally, rural America is not, as we are often told, a product of benign markets operating organically. Rural America is a creature of public creation. The book illustrates how US laws, institutions, and policymakers have created, perpetuated, and justified rural disadvantage. By highlighting the human role in geographic inequality, this search for accountability can help inform a more prosperous, equitable, and resilient future for all, especially in the face of climate change.

In light of Mozambique’s natural resources boom—especially its large-scale investments in mining, oil, and gas—this chapter analyses the prospects for the extractive industries to contribute to economic transformation from an institutional perspective. For this purpose, we address the institutional dynamics of the resources sector and consider the underlying causes of the identified outcomes, and we discuss the National Development Strategy, as the instrument outlining the vision for economic transformation and diversification. The chapter is based on a desk review—documental and bibliographic—and on primary data gathered by the authors as part of their research into the field of natural resources and the political economy of development. We conclude that, given Mozambique’s political patronage and clientelism, intra-ruling elite competition, limited productive base, weak state capacity, high level of poverty, and recurrent fiscal deficits, the prospects of the current resource boom leading to economic transformation, despite its considerable potential, are at best uncertain.

The chapter provides a comparative perspective on resource extraction with an empirical basis in Svalbard. Is the Arctic comparable to tendencies seen elsewhere, or is it unique? Many regions dependent on extraction face pressures to shift away from unsustainable economies. Social tensions are refracted through this lens, resulting in political conflicts affecting extraction policies. How does resource extraction in the Arctic fit into this pattern? The case analysed is Longyearbyen, Svalbard, which is irreducibly linked to a century of coal mining. The history and possible future of Svalbard relies on taking something out from the environment. In the 1990s, tourism was chosen as the new economic backbone. Research and education were boosted to ensure a continued Norwegian presence. Extraction continues, now directed towards “mining” knowledge (research), experience and memories (tourism), accompanied by insufficient added value locally, growing social inequalities and exploitation of international workforce. Like other communities based on extraction, Longyearbyen is volatile and dependent on forces beyond local control, but it also reflects the fragility of the Arctic.

Relationships between extractive industries and local northern communities are under intensive discussion. Scenarios are a way to explore uncertain futures and have been used for envisioning potential consequences of climate-related and political changes in the Arctic. However, existing Arctic scenarios do not target the relationship between extractive industries and local communities. By combining a review of published scenarios with insights from a series of scenario workshops carried out across Nordic Arctic, we have identified a series of wild cards that would have major implications for relations between extractive projects and local communities. By connecting these to existing general scenario archetypes, we enrich the established scenario narratives on plausible Arctic futures. We furthermore suggest linking participatory scenario exercises with efforts to elucidate the impacts of different drivers of change to examine the social-ecological-technological systems in which mining and local communities are embedded. Such efforts would be relevant for developing a more robust and anticipatory/proactive knowledge base for making political decisions about extractive industries.

Mining relies on the mobilization of emotions but also fosters them. Potentiality, hope, excitement, shame, anger, concern, and despair are emotions that are activated when mining is on the agenda. Acknowledging affects and emotions as an essential social driver within planning, advocating, modifying, or banning industrial resource extraction, the chapter focuses on the consultation process in Narsaq, South Greenland for a mining project at the Kuannersuit Plateau pursued by Greenland Minerals. With this study we go beyond the created boundaries of the participatory space and study which voices, atmosphere, and understanding of time are made possible within the apparatus of the presented mining project. In this case the atmosphere of peace and good governance promoted by the organizers of the hearing aimed to instill a feeling of trust and belief in a future for Narsaq based on the mining project. However, insecurity, anger, and lack of trust prevailed among the audience. The meeting ended in frustration and lack of communication. The conclusion identifies points of attention that stakeholders should be aware of and take seriously in order to meet the ideal of ‘best practice’.

Contemporary perceptions and discourses of Arctic mining are linked to concerns of local and global futures, especially in relation to climate change and its diverse ramifications for the Arctic and the world. Both the far North and the subterranean world have been imagined as mysterious and enchanted in European mindscapes. This chapter explores how extractive industries in the Arctic, and more generally, are entwined with such beyond-the-rational conceptualizations and the associated long-running fears and dreams linked to otherworldliness and danger but also treasure and a better future. These ideas and perceptions have a substantial affective potential, which is evident in historical and contemporary discourses of mining and the North. We propose that the controversies around and affective qualities of contemporary mines and mining are entangled with the broader cultural ideas and perceptions of the subterranean. The emotional and affective power of mines and mining – their ability to elicit responses such as fear, excitement, and fascination – must be accounted for in order to unravel our complex historically and culturally mediated relationship with the world underneath.

Chapter 24 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet explores the Great Acceleration of the “global petroleumscape,” and the immensity of the human waste we generate in a distended Urban Planet fueled by hydrocarbon. It surveys spaces of mineral extraction of all kinds before following the growth of the post-World War II petroleumscape and its many drastic effects on global geopolitics, the priorities of capitalists, and the wasteful shape of Cities of Hydrocarbon. From there, we visit the waste streams of Earthopolis, following them from their disgorgement in factories and spaces of consumption across the continents, down the rivers, across the oceans, and into the atmosphere as a whole.