Regulating Mine Rehabilitation and Closure on Indigenous Held Lands: Insights from the Regulated Resource States of Australia and Canada

Abstract

Countless environmental, social, and economic issues can stem from poor mine closure and post-mining land use planning practices. Such post-extractive landscapes have a disproportionate effect on local Indigenous communities that continue to live in these often remote areas on their traditional lands, with such peoples only recently being able to document and bring their values and stories to closure, rehabilitation, and post-mining land use policy. A strong regulatory environment is the often suggested response to such concerns, and this chapter examines the regulation of mine rehabilitation and closure (MR&C) practices in the developed resource states of Canada and Australia. Analysis of current regulation and policy along with examples from MR&C practice demonstrate that the regulatory state is failing to ensure social, economic, cultural, and environmentally safe landscapes for local Indigenous people on whose lands these mines were situated. This research highlights recent reform in both jurisdictions, primarily designed to limit state liability for abandoned mines, and the impact of that reform upon the influence and inclusion of Indigenous peoples’ interests and rights in MR&C. The chapter highlights the common structural, institutional, political and resource challenges that Indigenous peoples across Australia and Canada face in ensuring that their lands and country are effectively and safely rehabilitated, and argues that having a comprehensive regulatory environment is not enough. Greater Indigenous engagement, management, control and ownership of MR&C processes is required if we are to see better outcomes for local people in post-extractive landscapes.

Keywords

• extractivism
• mine rehabilitation and closure
• indigenous rights
• environmental justice
• environmental policy
• regulatory failure