As the world accelerates toward energy transitions, with increasing climate urgency, and rising social expectations, mining faces unprecedented pressure to deliver responsibly. But over the past decade, sustainability in mining has become highly performative. Today, it is often framed by metrics, ratings, and external frameworks—popularly known as Environment Social Governance (ESG). While these have driven important progress, they risk overshadowing what truly matters: the lived realities of communities, the on-the-ground judgement of leaders, and the authentic relationships that build trust.
This paper challenges the sector to move beyond the performance theatre of ESG scores and rediscover care, accountability, and genuine presence as the foundation of responsible mining.
Mining has undeniably made real progress, with health and safety outcomes improving sharply, environmental management becoming more disciplined, and social performance finally receiving long overdue attention. Many companies are far better at identifying and mitigating sustainability-related risks. None of this progress should be dismissed or minimised; it was hard-won and deserves acknowledgment.
But we have also lost something crucial: proximity to truth. In the pre-ESG era, sustainability work was messier, imperfect, sometimes chaotic, and often uncomfortable—but it brought us closer to people, to risks, and to the real foundations of trust. We dealt with what was in front of us rather than what appeared on a generic reporting template or software dashboard.
Superficial metrics and detached reporting are not just inadequate—they threaten mining’s legitimacy and
operational continuity. Real proximity and presence are strategic imperatives to navigate complexity and sustain social licence in an uncertain world. If the sector is serious about responsible extraction, we need a return to care—the deepest form of truth in mining—demonstrated through accountability, courageous leadership, authentic relationships, and consistent site-level improvements.
Mining’s future will be shaped by the honesty of its operational practice on mine sites and by the commitment of leadership teams to be present, to actively listen, to see what is uncomfortable, and to act even when no one is watching. Reclaiming that honesty requires courage and a willingness to confront what metrics often obscure.
What worries me most about today’s sustainability landscape is not the intent, but how we got from purposeful work to this theatre of metrics and optics. Most people working in this field care deeply about doing the right thing; the passion is real, and the stakes are high. What troubles me is what ESG has become: an industry in its own right, complete with inflated revenue streams, a scaremongering narrative, and gravitational sales pull.
Glossy methodologies, boilerplate ESG strategies, and curated slide decks obscure the truth. ESG has become a marketing label, driven more by slogans and optics than by real-world impact. In many cases, its influence now shapes behaviour and semantics more than environmental realities or community experiences do. Instead of bringing us closer to risk, contemporary ESG often creates a comfortable distance, a structured abstraction that feels reassuring precisely because it is detached. This distance dulls our senses to real sustainability risks and human consequences.
We have made sustainability too clean, too clinical, too controlled, and too disconnected from the truths on the ground. Over the past decade, sustainability in mining has gradually shifted away from its original intent. What began as practical, purpose-driven problem-solving has increasingly evolved into a system dominated by metrics, ratings, and a growing ESG services ecosystem. While these tools were meant to bring greater clarity and accountability, they have at times created unintended distance from the day-to-day realities of local and Indigenous communities and the ecosystems that host mining operations. In many cases, the emphasis on data, KPIs, and standardised reporting risks overshadowing the deeper judgement, relationship-building, and long-term commitments required to deliver truly meaningful change.
At the same time, aspects of the sustainability agenda have become increasingly performative. Well-intentioned efforts can slip into a kind of theatre—focused on demonstrating the appearance of progress or safeguarding reputation rather than engaging with the more complex, on-the-ground drivers of risk and trust. This dynamic can unintentionally reward optics over outcomes, compliance over curiosity, and reporting over relationships. The result is a sector that can feel, at times, disconnected from the realities that matter most: the daily lives of people near mine sites, the local environmental and social dynamics that shape risk, and the human foundations of trust that ultimately determine whether operations can succeed over the long term.
Yet it wasn’t always like this. In the early years, there were no global scorecards, no armchair consultants, no armies of assurance auditors. There were just problems—real ones—and a collection of passionate people trying to solve them on mine sites. It was imperfect and often under-resourced, but it was grounded in something we’ve since lost: proximity to truth. We did not make it perfect, but we kept it real. And it is that proximity—raw, unfiltered, sometimes uncomfortable—that the sector urgently needs to reclaim.
This paper argues three core points: that ESG has drifted into performance theatre; that this drift has distanced mining from the truths on the ground; and that responsible mining depends on restoring proximity, presence, and care.
There was a time when sustainability in mining was defined by lived experience rather than an alphabet soup of acronyms, buzzwords, judgemental questionnaires, and global conference circuits. I remember early site-level work where you walked into the employee canteen or the local community and had no choice but to face the reality of the situation.
If a site water management system wasn’t working, you saw it with your own eyes. For example, water
contamination was not just a report—it was visible in the streams and the health of local families. If a resettlement agreement had gone wrong, you felt the anger and fear directly in the conversations you had—face to face, without intermediaries, and without the insulation of corporate narrative management.
There were no corporate storylines to soften harsh realities. The stakes were human, visible, immediate, and often painful. The work was gritty, unpredictable, and nonlinear. It did not produce neat KPIs. It certainly did not align with the scoring grids of modern ESG ratings agencies, but it kept us honest.
When you spend real time in villages where people live with the consequences—good and bad—of mining decisions, you lose the luxury of abstraction. Problems become real, and so do solutions. We didn’t always get it right, but we stayed close to the truth. This kind of presence forced better decisions, aligning incentives toward impact rather than optics. It required judgement, humility, and courage.
Today, however, much of the ESG apparatus is built to sanitise or systematically avoid the truth, because the truth is rarely tidy enough to fit inside a generic KPI. Too much of what is classified within ESG revolves around crafting forgettable green pledges, symbolic gestures, and marketing visuals. Some companies still cling to static ESG playbooks and traffic-light dashboards. Many seek external “advice” from those who have never executed or taken ownership of real outcomes on mine sites but provide the comfort of polished branded products.
The industry has increasingly confused the documentation of assurance with actual assurance. Audits have become rituals of verification rather than processes of genuine learning. The result is a widening “narrative gap” between corporate headquarters and mine site realities—a gap that communities feel long before executives or the Board ever learn of it.
This erodes trust long before data reveals it. Transparency, accountability, and ESG reporting all matter. But we need to stop confusing legal compliance with ethical responsibility or allowing PR optics to replace conscience in our relationships with stakeholders. We must not let data silence authentic lived experience—or obscure inconvenient truths, which in this social-media-frenzied world can never be hidden for long. When data replaces dialogue, people feel unseen and unheard.
Let the sustainability impact on the ground lead. The ESG reports and certificates can follow.
The politicisation of ESG has created an unusual tension. In some markets, ESG has been weaponised, often as left-leaning ideological overreach or unnecessary bureaucracy. In others, it is considered an essential safeguard against social and environmental harm. The label has become polarising, but the underlying discipline of sustainability performance—legitimacy, trust, behaviour, and accountability—has never been more material.
It is important to be clear that ESG is a tool that seeks to measure practices, while sustainability demands vision and purpose. They are not the same, despite many using the words interchangeably. ESG is the scorecard, but sustainability is the game.
Mine sites cannot be judged on ESG compliance rather than sustainability consequences because you cannot audit trust, score dignity, or quantify relationships—and nor should you try. Indeed, some of the most powerful sustainability impacts in mining are invisible to ESG frameworks and scores. Yet by fixating on what can be measured, monetised, and benchmarked, some companies invest more in disclosure and ratings than in clean water, shared benefits, or genuine dialogue. Biodiversity is turned into carbon credits, and Indigenous and community engagement is reduced to a consultation checkbox to chase a permit or superficial logo. The danger lies in the illusion that numerical offsetting equals ecological care.
Case Study: Water Access in Tanzania |
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On a gold mine site in Tanzania, the company had promised the community a water system. But not long after the ribbon-cutting ceremony, it quietly began to fail on the ground. Pumps were broken, the distribution network had leaks, and half the households were still collecting water from contaminated streams. On paper, the project was marked as “completed.” The KPI was green in the dashboards presented to the Board. The ESG scores were great, and reports were full of photos of women and children smiling by the new pumps. But standing in the village, watching children scoop water from a stagnant pool, the truth was inescapable. The problem was not documentation or non-conformance—it was a failure of presence. No one had gone back to check or stayed close to the ground to listen. Within weeks, the mine leadership—embarrassed but motivated—put resources behind a full rebuild. This time, community water committees were established, spare parts were stocked, local mechanics trained, and participatory water monitoring was shared transparently. None of this ever appeared in an ESG score—but every family felt the difference. This example illustrates why proximity and ongoing presence matter far more than checkboxes and completion reports. |
It would be dishonest to pretend ESG contributed nothing of value. Mining’s history is full of lessons written in blood, dust, tailings, acid drainage, and broken promises. The sector needs guardrails, structure, and external pressure, and ESG in its earliest form helped drive precisely that.
Progress on health and safety is the clearest example. Fatality rates have declined dramatically due to stronger systems, better reporting, focus on critical hazards, and leadership attention. Environmental performance—from tailings monitoring to biodiversity management—has become more disciplined. ESG alone did not create these improvements, but it accelerated industry focus and accountability.
Regulations tightened, investors paid attention, and companies could no longer hide problems as easily. These shifts were essential. So, the issue is not that ESG is flawed; the issue is that ESG has metastasised into something disconnected from reality, where polishing corporate image has become more important than transforming lives near mine sites.
Case Study: Tailings Management in Canada |
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A large copper-gold mine in Canada used a newly drafted “good practice” framework to overhaul the These improvements saved lives during a severe storm event years later. The dam held. Evacuation plans worked. Communication with local authorities was fluid and transparent. Here, ESG pressure aligned with meaningful operational reform. This is the side of ESG worth preserving. When aligned with operational commitment, ESG pressures can deliver lifesaving outcomes. |
But some of the most powerful sustainability impacts in mining remain invisible to ESG scoring systems. Scoring systems reward what can be measured—not always what matters.
You cannot quantify whether a community leader trusts a mine General Manager—yet that single relationship often determines whether a project operates safely, peacefully, and sustainably. Political risk is shaped by informal networks, shifting power dynamics, and intergenerational histories of injustice, all of which impacts governance quality.
Central to this relational complexity are Indigenous peoples, whose governance systems, traditional knowledge, and stewardship of traditional lands are often excluded or marginalised in ESG frameworks. Genuine sustainability demands recognition of Indigenous sovereignty and meaningful partnerships that go beyond consultation checkboxes. Indigenous-led monitoring, co-management agreements, and respect for free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) are not merely ethical imperatives but foundational to the legitimacy mining operations require. Without these authentic relationships, the risk of conflict and project failure increases significantly.
Assurance processes and audits often fail not because of insufficient analysis, but because the analysis was too far removed from lived human systems and the local legitimacy that determines whether an operation is socially and environmentally bankable. With growing geopoliticisation, resource nationalism, and societal expectations, the distance between what gets measured and what truly matters has widened to the point where ESG systems are frequently diagnosing the wrong issues or missing emerging risks entirely.
We built a system that tries to impose the numerical logic of financial markets onto systems that are social, ecological, and fundamentally relational. Yet so much of what matters in mining defies quantification: trust, justice, legitimacy, human rights, biodiversity protection, cultural continuity. None of these are fungible, and none behaves like material financial risk factors. Still, the ESG ecosystem increasingly treats them as though they can be reduced to numbers on a spreadsheet and, even worse, aggregated into an arbitrary score.
ESG frameworks often oversimplify context, masking realities such as the fact that poverty and political instability cannot be mitigated through KPIs, that mines often become de facto social safety nets in weak states, community expectations evolve dynamically and often unpredictably, local leadership structures are fluid rather than democratic, and grievances usually reflect deeper structural issues rather than immediate triggers.
These truths require judgement and courage, not metrics. When data sanitises, abstracts, or suppresses lived experience—intentionally or not—the sector loses its ability to act honestly, interpret early warning signs, and respond to emerging risks with the maturity and nuance that responsible mining demands.
Case Study: Local Liaison in Papua New Guinea |
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At a gold mine in highlands Papua New Guinea, a single community relations officer—a local woman in her late 50s—carried more influence over social stability than any formal policy. She had no corporate title considered “material” by ESG frameworks. Although she appeared nowhere in reporting, she had decades of relationships, emotional intelligence, and local legitimacy. She understood and respected the “Wontok” cultural norms. She resolved disputes before they escalated. She de-escalated rumours before they became blockades. She acted as a cross-cultural translator between expatriate staff, traditional leaders, and local families. Her work prevented conflicts that would have cost the mine tens of millions in operational stoppages. No ESG metric captured her contribution. Her work illustrates why the most material risks and mitigations are relational, not procedural. To the system, she was invisible. To the community, she was indispensable. Her work embodies the relational trust no ESG metric can quantify, but that determines operational success. |
The sector’s obsession with quantitative metrics stems from a narrow, Westernised worldview modelled on financial markets. The decontextualised numerical knowledge that ratings agencies rely on has created false comparability by scoring mines across vastly different jurisdictions, cultures, and risk profiles. This incentivises metric gaming, skewing focus toward what is easy to measure instead of what is truly material.
ESG ratings depend on knowledge that has been homogenised and stripped of local meaning. The result is the illusion that a mine in Northern Finland, operating in a high-governance environment with strong public institutions, can be evaluated using the same scoring model as a mine in Mongolia, Burkina Faso or the Democratic Republic of Congo. This approach rewards geography, not capability. It penalises companies that choose to operate in complex jurisdictions where responsible mining could be genuinely transformational, elevating what is neat and quantifiable instead of what is material, uncomfortable, or systemic.
Ultimately, nature and local communities conduct the real sustainability audit. They, not the ratings agencies or certification issuers, are the ultimate arbiters of whether a company has earned the legitimacy to operate. Neither one cares about an “AA” ESG rating or whether the company has been assessed as a top-quartile ESG performer among its peers.
Case Study: Leadership Engagement in Chile |
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At a copper mine in Chile, senior leadership committed to monthly site visits and direct dialogue with local communities, including the Diaguita Indigenous people. Rather than delegating all engagement to consultants, executives prioritised face-to-face listening sessions and transparent communication—even when difficult topics arose. This sustained presence allowed for early identification of emerging concerns, timely responses to grievances, and co-development of social programmes aligned with community priorities. The company’s reputation for genuine care fostered long-term stability and increased workforce morale and smoother permitting processes, demonstrating the tangible benefits of leadership accountability beyond metrics. |
Transparency, traceability, and accountability are essential. Yet today’s ESG system often oversimplifies complexity, separating cultural, social, environmental, and governance realities into disconnected metrics. Teams are asked to quantify almost everything—except the lived meaning of sustainability. The industry has become skilled at performing sustainability rather than practicing it.
ESG was never designed to be a moral scoreboard or a proxy for legitimacy—it was originally an investor tool meant to assess financial exposure and governance quality. But in the past decade, over 160 rating agencies and data providers have emerged, each promising numerical certainty in a world of nuance. The assumption that high scores equal trust remains widespread, even though ratings capture only disclosure quality, not lived experience. They cannot show how communities experience a mine, how authority is exercised, how grievances are handled, or how cultural dynamics shape risk. The most consequential risks in mining are relational and behavioural—beyond the reach of structured questionnaires or remote policy reviews. Ratings may offer comfort, but not the understanding required for responsible mining.
As the distance grows between companies and the communities they are supposed to serve, meaningful
engagement with local and traditional leaders is eschewed or delegated to consultants and auditors. Senior executives spend more time preparing ESG presentations for Boards and investors than reviewing grievances. Site teams often fill endless templates and questionnaires instead of walking through villages to listen.
This misplaced focus has damaging consequences. For communities, it often feels like attempted extortion disguised as “engagement.” Rumours spread faster than facts. Gender dynamics remain unaddressed because discussing them is uncomfortable. Cultural protocols are ignored because they don’t fit into standardised engagement models.
Grievances escalate because early warning signs are missed. The current system rewards reporting over
relationships—and in mining, that is a recipe for instability.
Case Study: Missed Signals in Brazil |
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At a mine in Brazil, all ESG assurance indicators pointed to excellent social performance. Stakeholder mapping was complete. A grievance mechanism was in place. An Indigenous Peoples plan had been drafted. Engagement logs were robust, and external consultants had signed off. Yet beneath the surface, the local and Quilombos communities were seething. A land dispute had never been resolved. People attended meetings only because political brokers pressured them into compliance. When a new exploration area was announced, frustrations erupted into protests, roadblocks, and sabotage. The company was blindsided—not because the data was wrong, but because the data never captured the truth. Had leadership spent more time on the ground and invested in qualitative intelligence, the warning signs would have been obvious months earlier. This underscores why qualitative, on-the-ground intelligence is indispensable—it reveals warning signs that quantitative data often miss. |
Authentic engagement is slow, relational work that requires patience, presence, curiosity, and keen observation. It involves noticing who speaks and who stays silent, or understanding how gender, age, wealth, and political affiliation shape power. It requires paying attention when people stop showing up—not only when they speak.
These subtle, often invisible insights are vital for maintaining social stability and preventing conflict. Companies that neglect them do so at their own risk.
The future of sustainability assessment will not be about generating more data, but about interpreting the data we already have more intelligently. Used poorly, AI will simply accelerate today’s performance theatre by introducing more bias, producing automated scores, generic risk flags, and machine-generated ESG reports that further detach companies from frontline realities.
But used wisely, AI could help restore proximity rather than replace it. Machine learning models can identify emerging grievances hidden in qualitative data, detect subtle signals in social media and local narratives, and provide early warnings long before they escalate into conflict. AI can parse thousands of unstructured observations from site teams, community meetings, and grievance logs—revealing patterns that human analysts miss because they are overwhelmed by volume. When paired with judgement, presence, and lived experience, AI could become a tool for deeper listening and prediction rather than a substitute for them.
Beyond AI, other technologies offer opportunities to enhance presence and dialogue without replacing human judgement. Mobile apps enable real-time community feedback, remote sensing provides transparent environmental monitoring, and blockchain could support traceability with increased transparency and trust. The challenge is ensuring these tools serve as complements to—and not substitutes for—the relational work and leadership presence
that underpin genuine sustainability.
AI will never replace the need for leadership presence, but it could strengthen the sector’s ability to learn, anticipate, and respond with greater care.
Accountability in mining has never been about documentation alone; it has always been about behaviour, presence, consistency, and relationships. Leadership presence and accountability are at the heart of genuine sustainability.
This includes leadership teams spending time on site, listening directly—without intermediaries. It means responding to grievances openly, honestly, and with real follow-through. It means being upfront about the limits of a project—without over-promising benefits or downplaying risks. It requires acknowledging mistakes and correcting them early.
Insights gathered in this way can help leaders recognise early warning signs and grasp how decisions resonate locally. They can capture truths that are essential for preventing conflict and earning trust but cannot be measured by KPIs.
Real due diligence cannot shortcut proximity. Assessing a mining project’s sustainability profile requires first-hand insight into its culture, leadership character, contractor ecosystem, and jurisdictional pressures. Mining is a living, complex system, not a static dataset; its resilience cannot be inferred solely from documentation, disclosures, or external scores. Effective assessment demands narrative intelligence—the grounded, contextual understanding that comes from being close to operations and deeply engaged with the social, political, and environmental systems in which a mine operates.
Organisations can develop qualitative approaches to assessment. Storytelling, ethnographic fieldwork, participatory community monitoring, and leadership accountability narratives all provide rich insights. Regular, unfiltered feedback loops with frontline staff and community members, coupled with transparent reflection on challenges and failures, offer a truer picture of sustainability than any scorecard can capture.
It is hard to think of one catastrophic incident where ESG scores provided any predictive warning whatsoever. Conversely, there are multiple examples of companies that suffered major incidents preceded by amazing ESG disclosures, certifications, and ratings.
Without urgent change, mining risks escalating social conflicts, operational disruptions, reputational damage, and loss of investor confidence. The fragile trust extended by communities can quickly unravel when metrics mask real grievances, and management remains distant. The costs of ignoring proximity and care are not abstract—they are concrete and often catastrophic.
True sustainability is built on meaningful impact, fuelled by care, presence, and genuine accountability. It calls on corporate leaders and empowered site teams to listen with intent, observe with humility, and act
authentically—even when no one is watching. In this context, reporting and ratings are important, but they must follow meaningful impact rather than define it.
To reclaim sustainability’s original spirit, the sector needs to redirect resources away from compliance silos and embed them once again within the operational decisions and site-level systems that shape real outcomes
To translate these principles into practice, mining companies should embed local voices directly in decision-making processes, ensuring that Indigenous and community perspectives shape not only consultation but operational and strategic outcomes. Ongoing, hands-on social intelligence must be prioritised—going far beyond perception surveys or checkbox compliance to grasp the evolving cultural, political, and environmental dynamics on the ground.
Frontline supervisors need to be empowered with both the authority and support to intervene decisively when risks arise, fostering a psychologically safe culture where care is recognised as a critical competency and a core risk management tool. Transparent, culturally appropriate, and accessible grievance mechanisms should be trusted pathways for communities to voice concerns early, preventing escalation and building confidence in the company’s commitment to responsiveness.
Visible leadership presence matters—regular, unmediated engagement with sites and communities is essential to maintain proximity to truth and nurture relationships built on trust. Internally, incentives and performance measures must reward behaviours that strengthen social licence, rather than those that merely enhance reporting metrics or investor optics.
Responsible mining requires acknowledging and managing the inherent trade-offs between competing social, environmental, and economic priorities. No single discipline or stakeholder holds all the answers. Instead, mining companies must foster interdisciplinary collaboration, bringing together technical experts, security specialists, social scientists, Indigenous knowledge holders, environmentalists, and community leaders to co-create solutions. This approach recognises that sustainability challenges are complex and often involve difficult choices, but through dialogue and integrated thinking, companies can identify balanced strategies that advance long-term resilience and
shared value.
Finally, the sector should continue to collaborate with investors, regulators, and civil society to develop more nuanced assessment frameworks—ones that balance quantitative indicators with qualitative, context-rich insights. Only by embracing complexity rather than oversimplifying it can mining companies and their partners navigate the social and environmental challenges of today’s world with integrity and effectiveness.
This transformation demands courage and commitment at every level—from frontline teams to executive leadership. It is a call to move beyond comfort zones and metrics-driven complacency, embracing the complexity, uncertainty, and humanity that define responsible mining.
Only by centring care, presence, and genuine impact can the sector rebuild trust and secure a sustainable future.
Reclaiming this deeper truth is essential—because care is not soft; it is the foundation upon which trust, resilience, and ultimately, the long-term success of mining must rest.
Mining is an industry built on long-term horizons, permanent landscape changes, and deeply interdependent human relationships. In such a sector, truth is not found in KPIs or through AI. It is found in care.
Care cannot be captured in an ESG score, a dashboard, or a certification. It does not appear in annual report tables. It cannot be aggregated, compared, or ranked. But people can feel it. Employees and communities know when it is present, and they certainly know when it is missing. Mine sites with high trust, stable workforces, healthy cultures, and transparent relationships are almost always places where care is practiced consistently—quietly, without applause, and often without formal recognition. This is the deeper truth mining must reclaim.
If mining is to earn legitimacy in a world of rising expectations and tightening geopolitical and societal scrutiny, it must resist the gravitational pull of ESG performance theatre—of scores, stories and slogans—and return to what matters: presence, judgement, honesty, and care. It must prioritise the real over the performative. It must let impact drive reporting, not the reverse. It must reward courage—the courage to see things as they are.
Despite the challenges, mining holds immense potential to be a force for positive transformation—if it re-centres humanity, presence, and care at its core. The path forward demands courage and humility but promises richer relationships, stronger resilience, and lasting legitimacy. By embracing this deeper truth, the sector can meet the rising expectations of a changing world and build a sustainable future that benefits both people and the planet.