Making CSR work: Evidence from Indonesias tin mining province

Mineral producing countries increasingly mandate corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives to mitigate negative impacts of mineral extraction through local development projects, but evidence of their effectiveness is scarce. The Indonesian Program Pengembangan dan Pemberdayaan Masyarakat (PPM) requires mining firms to fund local development projects. However, its effectiveness is limited by low public awareness and governance issues. We run a survey experiment with 610 respondents in 35 tinmining communities to test whether information on the PPM scheme and real-world examples of projects funded through it, presented through two video treatments, enhance knowledge and impact rights perceptions and behavior regarding PPM. Our findings show that a pure information treatment (T1) has a positive impact on respondents’ beliefs that they have a right to benefit from mining revenues but reduces their likelihood of making a donation to an NGO that supports PPM project implementation. Adding examples of successful PPM projects to the information treatment (T2) further strengthens respondents perceptions of their rights to benefit and influence decision-making and also increases the likelihood that they will request more information on PPM and local development, with no impact on actual behavior. We conclude that awareness of such revenue-sharing schemes like PPM could be enhanced with tailored information but whether this would be enough to increase involvement by local communities is uncertain.