Corporate Social Responsibility: Understanding the Mining Stakeholder with a Case Study

The social responsibility of corporate mining has been challenged by a significant socio-political risk from local communities. These issues reduce shareholder value by increasing costs and decreasing the market perception of corporate social responsibility. Community engagement is the process of understanding the behavior and interests of a group of targeted mining communities through surveys and data analysis, with the purpose of incorporating mining community acceptance into the mining sustainability. While mining organizations have discussed community engagement to varying degrees, there are three main shortcomings in current studies, as concluded in the authors’ previous research. This paper presents a framework to apply discrete choice theory to improve mining community engagement and corporate mining social responsibility. In addition, this paper establishes the main technical challenges to implement the developed framework, and presents methods to overcome the challenges for future research with a case study. The contribution of this research will transform mine sustainability in a fundamental way by facilitating the incorporation of effective community engagement. This will lead to more sustainable mines that local communities support.