Sustainability reporting in the mining sector: Managing for legitimacy

BÖHLING, KATHRIN; DIEGO MURGUIA

Atenas

Congreso; 31 European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS) Colloquium; 2015

EGOS

There is general understanding that metal mining operations may cause significant damages to the natural environment, pose threats to the livelihoods of local communities and publichealth, violate human rights, and undermine democracy. For a long time, these concerns were ignored. The large-scale mining industry has nonetheless become a leader in social andenvironmental reporting. Around the same time, numerous case studies about mining-related conflicts in the resource-rich peripheries of the global South were emerging. Many of these show that the management of reporting creates a gap between claimed sustainability and actual on-the-ground performance. The growth of non-financial disclosure in the mineral mining sector exemplifies characteristics of the ?non-state market-driven governance system? (Bernstein & Cashore 2007), whose ?evolutionary logic? seems to go hand in hand with an underwhelming performance. The present paper seeks to explain this logic with insights from management studies. Tendency for organizational narcissism in sustainability reporting, instrumentalized stakeholder dialogues, and co-optation of government authorities in environmental management help explaining why mining-related conflicts sustain.