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The purpose of this paper is to increase knowledge about community relations and development (CRD) activities done in conjunction with mining activities of multinational companies affecting indigenous peoples and thus help improve relationships between them, despite continuing bad consequences the people continue to endure. It is through such better relationships that these consequences may be redressed and mitigated, and greater sharing of benefits of mining may occur, bearing in mind what constitutes benefits may differ from the perspectives of the indigenous peoples and the miners.

A qualitative approach is taken, including interviews with company officials responsible for CRD activities, elaborated with observations, company and public documents and previous literature about these mining operations and the peoples.

The CRD activities have gradually increased compared with their absence previously. They are officially labelled social investment in community development programmes, and are funded from profits and couched in terms of human development, human rights, preservation of culture and physical development of infrastructure. Dissatisfied with programme quality and relevance, company officials now relate with indigenous people, their leaders and representatives in ways called engagement and partnerships.

The findings can inform policies and practices of the parties to CRD, which in this West Papua case would be the miners and their company, CRD practitioners, the indigenous peoples and the civil authorities at the local and national level and aid industry participants.

The study acknowledges and addresses social initiatives to develop the indigenous peoples affected by mining.

The study extends older studies in the same territory before CRD had matured, and corroborates and elaborates other studies of CRD in different territories.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the impact of artisanal small-scale mining (ASM) on sustainable livelihoods in the Tarkwa-Nsuaem Municipality of Ghana. The study seeks to answer the following questions: what is the impact of ASM on livelihoods in the Tarkwa-Nsuaem Municipality? What measures could be put in place to ensure the sustainability of livelihoods in the municipality?

A case study approach to inquiry was used in the study. The authors used interview guides (structured and unstructured) to collect primary data from a sample of 400 household heads, 19 institutions, six ASM firms, six mineral processing companies, and two gold-buying agents, and traditional authorities from the Tarkwa-Nsuaem Municipality.

The findings of the study indicate among other things that land has been rendered unproductive due to the inability of the dominant ASM firms to reclaim lands after mining. The workers’ exposure to cyanide and mercury makes them vulnerable to all manner of health risks, which is a threat to the sustenance of livelihoods. Owing to the unsustainable nature of mining activities, the future indicates not only increases in unemployment but also environmental degradation and health concerns.

The paper contains a significant new perspective of knowledge especially by contextualising sustainable development with ASM. This is an area that has largely been ignored by development researchers. The paper further emphasises the need for policy makers to evolve and embrace developmental approach that is intergenerational.

The use of technology in Saudi Arabian higher education is constantly evolving. With the support of the 2030 Saudi vision, many research studies have started covering learning analytics and Big Data in the Saudi Arabian higher education. Examining learning analytics in higher education institutions promise transforming the learning experience to maximize students' learning potential. With the thousands of students' transactions recorded in various learning management systems (LMS) in Saudi educational institutions, the need to explore and research learning analytics in Saudi Arabia has caught the interest of scholars and researchers regionally and internationally. This chapter explores a Saudi private university in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and examines its rich learning analytics and discovers the knowledge behind it. More than 300,000 records of LMS analytical data were collected from a consecutive 4-year historic data. Romero, Ventura, and Garcia (2008) educational data mining process was applied to collect and analyze the analytical reports. Statistical and trend analysis were applied to examine and interpret the collected data. The study has also collected lecturers' testimonies to support the collected analytical data. The study revealed a transformative pedagogy that impact course instructional design and students' engagement.

Several studies have examined the impact of market fundamentals on house prices. However, the effect of economic sectors on housing prices is limited despite the existence of two-speed economies in some countries, such as South Africa. Therefore, this study aims to examine the impact of mining activities on house prices. This intends to understand the direction of house price spreads and their duration so policymakers can provide remediation to the housing market disturbance swiftly.

This study investigated the effect of mining activities on house prices in South Africa, using quarterly data from 2000Q1 to 2019Q1 and deploying an auto-regressive distributed lag model.

In the short run, we found that changes in mining activities, as measured by the contribution of this sector to gross domestic product, impact the housing price of mining towns directly after the first quarter and after the second quarter in the non-mining cities. Second, we found that inflationary pressure is instantaneous and impacts house prices in mining towns only in the short run but not in the long run, while increasing housing supply will help cushion house prices in both submarkets. This study extended the analysis by examining a possible spillover in house prices between mining and non-mining towns. This study found evidence of spillover in housing prices from mining towns to non-mining towns without any reciprocity. In the long run, a mortgage lending rate and housing supply are significant, while all the explanatory variables in the non-mining towns are insignificant.

These results reveal that enhanced mining activities will increase housing prices in mining towns after the first quarter, which is expected to spill over to non-mining towns in the next quarter. These findings will inform housing policymakers about stabilising the housing market in mining and non-mining towns. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to measure the contribution of mining to house price spillover.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the ongoing debate on governance, accountability, transparency and corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the mining sector of a developing country context. It examines the reporting practices of the two largest transnational gold-mining companies in Tanzania in order to draw attention to the role played by local government regulations and advocacy and campaigning by nationally organised non-governmental organisations (NGOs) with respect to promoting corporate social reporting practices.

The paper takes a political economy perspective to consider the serious implications of the neo-liberal ideologies of the global capitalist economy, as manifested in Tanzania’s regulatory framework and in NGO activism, for the corporate disclosure, accountability and responsibility of transnational companies (TNCs). A qualitative field case study methodology is adopted to locate the largely unfamiliar issues of CSR in the Tanzanian mining sector within a more familiar literature on social accounting. Data for the case study were obtained from interviews and from analysis of documents such as annual reports, social responsibility reports, newspapers, NGO reports and other publicly available documents.

Analysis of interviews, press clips and NGO reports draws attention to social and environmental problems in the Tanzanian mining sector, which are arguably linked to the manifestation of the broader crisis of neo-liberal agendas. While these issues have serious impacts on local populations in the mining areas, they often remain invisible in mining companies’ social disclosures. Increasing evidence of social and environmental ills raises serious questions about the effectiveness of the regulatory frameworks, as well as the roles played by NGOs and other pressure groups in Tanzania.

By empowering local NGOs through educational, capacity building, technological and other support, NGOs’ advocacy, campaigning and networking with other civil society groups can play a pivotal role in encouraging corporations, especially TNCs, to adopt more socially and environmentally responsible business practices and to adhere to international and local standards, which in turn may help to improve the lives of many poor people living in developing countries in general, and Tanzania in particular.

This paper contributes insights from gold-mining activities in Tanzania to the existing literature on CSR in the mining sector. It also contributes to political economy theory by locating CSR reporting within the socio-political and regulatory context in which mining operations take place in Tanzania. It is argued that, for CSR reporting to be effective, robust regulations and enforcement and stronger political pressure must be put in place.

The purpose of this paper is to suggest a framework for extracting the sequential patterns of maintenance activities and related spare parts information from historical records of maintenance data with pre-defined support or threshold values.

A data mining approach has been adopted for predicting the maintenance activity along with spare parts. It starts with a collection of spare parts and maintenance data, and then the development of sequential patterns followed by formation of frequent spare part groups, and finally, integration of sequential maintenance activities with the associated spare parts.

This study suggests a framework for extracting the sequential patterns of maintenance activities from historical records of maintenance data with pre-defined support or threshold values. A rule-based approach is proposed in this paper to predict the occurrence of next maintenance activity along with the information of spare parts consumption for that maintenance activity.

Presented model can be extended for analyzing the failure maintenance activities and performing root cause analysis that can give more valuable suggestion to maintenance managers to take corrective actions prior to next occurrence of failures. In addition, the timestamp information can be utilized to prioritize the maintenance activity that is ignored in this study.

The proposed model has a high potential for industrial applications and is validated through a case study. The study suggests that the model gives a better approach for selecting spare parts based on their similarity or correlation, considering their actual occurrence during maintenance activities. Apart from this, the clustering of spare parts also trains maintenance manager to learn about the dependency among the spares for group stocking and maintaining the parts availability during maintenance activities.

This study has used the technique of data mining to find dependent spare parts itemset from the database of the company and developed the model for associated spare parts requirement for subsequent maintenance activity.

The study examines the social and environmental responsibility indicators disclosed by three International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM) corporate mining members in their social and environmental reporting (SER) from 2006 to 2014. To achieve this aim, the author limits the data two years before (i.e. from 2006 to 2007) and six years after (i.e. from 2009 to 2014) the implementation of the Sustainable Development Framework in the mining sector in 2008.

Using the techniques of content analysis and interpretive textual analysis, this study examines 27 social and environmental responsibility reports published between 2006 and 2014 by three ICMM corporate mining members. The study develops a disclosure index based on the earlier work of Hackston and Milne (1996), together with other disclosure items suggested in the extant literature and considered appropriate for this work. The disclosure index for this study comprised six disclosure categories (“employee”, “environment”, “community involvement”, “energy”, “governance” and “general”). In each of the six disclosure categories, only 10 disclosure items were chosen and that results in 60 disclosure items.

A total of 830 out of a maximum of 1,620 social and environmental responsibility indicators, representing 51% (168 employees, 151 environmental, 145 community involvement, 128 energy, 127 governance and 111 general) were identified and examined in company SER. The study showed that the sample companies relied on multiple strategies for managing pragmatic legitimacy and moral legitimacy via disclosures. Such practices raise questions regarding company-specific disclosure policies and their possible links to the quality/quantity of their disclosures. The findings suggest that managers of mining companies may opt for “cherry-picking” and/or capitalise on events for reporting purposes as well as refocus on company-specific issues of priority in their disclosures. While such practices may appear appropriate and/or timely to meet stakeholders’ needs and interests, they may work against the development of comprehensive reports due to the multiple strategies adopted to manage pragmatic and moral legitimacy.

A limitation of this research is that the author relied on self-reported corporate disclosures, as opposed to verifying the activities associated with the claims by the sample mining companies.

The findings from this research will help future social and environmental accounting researchers to operationalise Suchman’s typology of legitimacy in other contexts.

With growing large-scale mining activity, potential social and environmental footprints are obviously far from being socially acceptable. Powerful and legitimacy-conferring stakeholders are likely to disapprove such mining activity and reconsider their support, which may threaten the survival of the mining company and also create a legitimacy threat for the whole mining industry.

This study innovates by focusing on Suchman’s (1995) typology of legitimacy framework to interpret SER in an industry characterised by potential social and environmental footprints – the mining industry.

This study aims to examine the socio-economic and environmental impacts of mining activities as perceived by communities in Ghana, with data being drawn from primary and secondary sources.

A total of 90 community residents were interviewed, with 15 from each of the six selected different communities.

The findings revealed a positive perception that corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices of mining companies contribute to the development of mining communities in Ghana by creating jobs and generating income. However, it became clear that mining activities, particularly small-scale mining, create many social and environmental challenges as well. This includes land degradation, which reduces the fertility of community-owned land suitable for agricultural use. In addition, pollution of waterways and streams intensifies the plight of community residents living in mining areas.

Since 2011, the mining industry has invested between US$12m (in 2013) and US$44m (in 2011) in Ghana’s communities. The amount spent in 2019 was US$24m. The funds were spent by the industry in areas such as roads, education, health and electricity, among others. Still, it seems more effort is needed by the mining companies to harmonise the CSR practice and gain better impression by local people. In spite of the mining industry’s investment levels, more than half of the community respondents said it was insufficient. One-third of the respondents went as far as suggesting the mining companies had a negative impact on infrastructure improvement and community development.

The purpose of the work is to use a systematic process to identify the environmental and social impacts of small-scale alluvial gold mining projects using data from Ghana.

In this work, we used survey data collected from experts in the mining sector. This was followed by the use of a risk analysis approach to identify the significant and non-significant environmental and social impacts.

Seven key impacts associated with typical alluvial mining operations were identified. The first two are the loss of vegetation and the issue of airborne diseases from dust as a result of vegetation losses during the clearing of vegetation in the block out area. The third and fourth issues were loss of vegetation and airborne diseases as a result of vegetation losses during the removal of overburden. The fifth, sixth and seventh, most significant issues identified were the pollution from smoke fumes from the processing machines; and wastewater from the washing process. The last issue of significance was the dust pollution from the transportation of the washed gravel back to the mined pit.

One main limitation is that the data for this study were collected from Ghana.

The results indicate the need for proper and systematic measures to identify the environmental and social impacts of mining activities.

The work provides some insights into the strategies of identifying environmental and social impacts of mining activities. It is also one of the key works that systematically identify environmental and social impacts of small-scale alluvial gold projects.