Improving mineral mining enterprises environmental performance through corporate social responsibility practices in China: Implications for minerals policymaking

Corporate social responsibility of mineral mining sector enterprises is greatly important to understand due to its significant role in the social and environmental footprint of the country. Over the years, the natural resources development sector, especially the mineral mining industry, has shown tremendous growth. Although it brought significant profitability for the enterprise as well as a great contribution to economic growth, However, its social and environmental impacts brought serious challenges for the global community. Therefore, scholars and practitioners in the natural resources management sector, especially the mineral mining sector, call for the importance of corporate social responsibility for enterprises to minimize their social and environmental impact. However, in the context of the mineral mining sector, it is unclear whether corporate social responsibility practices (i.e., environmental conservation, waste reduction and sustainability initiatives) attract stakeholders to participate in corporate social activities and how to improve the environmental performance of mineral mining enterprises. Keeping in mind the limitations of existing research, this paper aims to study the corporate social responsibility and environmental performance of mineral mining firms. In addition, the study incorporates the role of stakeholder engagement as a mediator, which opens a new path for the effective implementation of corporate social responsibility. The study adopted a survey method for data collection, and data was collected from 227 managers that were utilized in this study. The data collected from managers of mineral mining companies was utilized, and we employed structural equation modeling techniques to find robust results. The findings reveal that environmental conservation and waste reduction strategies under the framework of corporate social responsibility directly not influence the environmental performance of the enterprises. However, stakeholder engagement serves as bridge among environmental conservation, waste reduction strategies and environmental performance of the mineral mining enterprises. Whereas sustainability initiative could directly improve environmental performance. The findings of the study provide important insights for mineral policy formulation and managerial decision making to foster environmental performance of mineral mining enterprises in China.