Community Development Agreements: The Hardening and Evaluation of a Norm

• Main Author: Petrusevski, Luka G
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Scholarship@Western 2022
• Subjects: Social License; Community Development Agreement; Mining; Natural Resources; Environmental Law; Indigenous; Indian; and Aboriginal Law; Natural Resources Law; Oil; Gas; and Mineral Law; Political Economy; Canada; Greenland
• Online Access: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/8879; https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/context/etd/article/11532/viewcontent/Luka_Petrusevski_ThesisFinal.pdf

Large scale mining projects generate highly variable outcomes. Proponents of mining cite benefits including job creation and revenue generation, while critics point to adverse social and economic impacts borne by mining-proximate communities. Community-based concerns about mining operations have raised ethical and social justice considerations relating to human-rights and consent. Community development agreements (CDAs) have emerged as an increasingly common tool to address such concerns and facilitate the delivery of tangible benefits from mining operations to affected communities. The effectiveness of CDAs, however, varies widely depending on the negotiated provisions and their implementation. This work contributes to the understanding of CDAs by refining a comprehensive evaluation framework that can be used to empirically analyze CDAs. The framework is applied to CDAs from Australia, Canada, Papua New Guinea, Ghana, Greenland, Mongolia, and Sierra Leone, following which exploratory statistical analyses are conducted to highlight novel insights that can be drawn from its application.