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“We Need Social Licence to Actually Mine and We Believe Communities Are Part of What We Do”: Contested Corporate Citizenship

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Gold Mining and the Discourses of Corporate Social Responsibility in Ghana

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Abstract

Andrews engages with two important concepts—social licence to operate and corporate citizenship—to investigate the positive image corporations have created for themselves through the CSR discourse. This is done by examining a variety of information from corporations’ websites, sustainability reports, and personal interviews conducted with several stakeholders. Andrews finds that the enactment that occurs via the discourse of corporate citizenship takes our attention away from the flaws and contestations that the concept and practice of CSR encounters in local sites of implementation. Also, the uptake of sustainable development discourses by the corporation makes us take for granted notions around ‘sustainable mining’ practices, a terminology that is oxymoronic considering the exploitative nature of mineral extraction.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Global and International Studies, University of Northern British Columbia, Prince George, BC, Canada

    Nathan Andrews

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Correspondence to Nathan Andrews .

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Andrews, N. (2019). “We Need Social Licence to Actually Mine and We Believe Communities Are Part of What We Do”: Contested Corporate Citizenship. In: Gold Mining and the Discourses of Corporate Social Responsibility in Ghana. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92321-5_2

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