To Approve or not to Approve? A Comparative Analysis of State-Company-Indigenous Community Interactions in Mining in Canada and Sweden.

This Special Section explores the interplay between Indigenous peoples, industry, and the state in five proposed and active mining projects in Canada and Sweden. The overall aim is to identify factors shaping the quality of Indigenous community-industry-state interactions in mining and mine development. An ambition underlying the research is to develop knowledge to help manage mining related land-use conflicts in Sweden by drawing on Canadian comparisons and experience.

Exploring prospects of deliberation in intractable natural resource management conflicts.

Deliberative processes are increasingly advocated as means to handle intractable natural resource management (NRM) conflicts. Research shows that disputing actors can deliberate and achieve higher degrees of mutual understanding and working agreements under ideal conditions, but the transferability of these findings to real-world intractable NRM conflicts can be questioned. This paper explores the possibilities of designing and realizing deliberation and its expected outcomes in real-world NRM conflicts.

Why do Mines Fail to Obtain a Social License to Operate?: Insights from the Proposed Kallak Iron Mine (Sweden) and the Prosperity/New Prosperity Gold-Copper Mine (Canada).

Opposition to mines endures even in countries with relatively strong environmental assessment processes and regulations. Why proposed mines fail to obtain a social license to operate is analyzed by developing a framework comprised of three concepts-process legitimacy, distributional outcomes, and values compatibility-drawing from the social license to operate, interactive governance, and environmental justice literatures. The framework is applied to understand opposition from local Indigenous people to two mine projects, one in Sweden and the other in British Columbia, Canada.

Competing pathways to sustainability? Exploring conflicts over mine establishments in the Swedish mountain region.

Natural resource (NR) exploitation often gives rise to conflict. While most actors intend to manage collectively used places and their NRs sustainably, they may disagree about what this entails. This article accordingly explores the origin of NR conflicts by analysing them in terms of competing pathways to sustainability.

Understanding consistencies and gaps between desired forest futures: An analysis of visions from stakeholder groups in Sweden.

Conflicting perspectives on forests has for a long time challenged forest policy development in Sweden. Disagreements about forest futures create intractable deadlocks when stakeholders talk past each other. The purpose of this study is to move beyond this situation through the application of participatory backcasting.