Legal regimes for mining are experiencing enormous changes in the context of globalisation and against a backdrop of widespread expectation that mining should minimise its sustainability footprint and contribute to broad-based development.
Traditionally the focus of legal regimes for mining was on defining property rights to facilitate extraction; today, by contrast, the key challenge is to establish a basis for sustainable governance. What this means is that legal regimes for mining are expected to embody key principles and cooperative rules of engagement for integrated management that are effective, transparent, accountable and inclusive, as well as being oriented towards sustainable development. This book seeks to explore these issues, and the challenges facing those charged with designing and enforcing agreements made in an ever-more complex mining environment.
