Community Engagement and Participatory Inclusion in Mining: Challenges, Barriers, and Opportunities

The global energy transition will require the successful development and adoption of clean energy technologies that rely on critical minerals including lithium, copper, cobalt, nickel, and graphite, as well as rare earth elements. Extracting these minerals affects local communities who live on or around mineral-rich localities, and though the potential exists for these communities to benefit from the development, they often bear the brunt of negative social and environmental impacts while the economic benefits of mining flow elsewhere. Importantly, effective, equitable, and meaningful engagement with the community could provide a pathway to ensuring that the negative impacts of mining are reduced and provide means to share the benefits of the extraction with local communities. However, this style of engagement is infrequently adopted, due to a number of barriers (including lack of incentives, problematic incentives, lack of governance capacity, and more) that often make this type of engagement difficult or ineffective, frequently leading to severe and sustained conflict at the mines. This report examines participatory inclusion within the setting of mining across the world and explores approaches that can help uphold three core tenets of justice: recognition, distributional, and procedural. We provide systems-level solutions that can create an environment that allows for greater coordination—both internationally and within host countries—and an opportunity for more effective and equitable community engagement to emerge. As our demands for minerals increase over time, the importance of achieving positive equity outcomes through participatory inclusion grows in parallel; this report provides some pathways to help achieve this goal.