Public and corporate policies regarding mine closure focus on bio-physical remediation and ignore the social impacts associated with the end of mine life and the legacies that mining leaves. In a departure from most existing writing on social impact assessment and extractive industry, we show that this situation does not simply reflect the disciplinary dominance of environmental science or a gap in knowledge regarding social impacts that can be addressed by allocation of additional resources and research effort. Rather it reflects the strategic application of ignorance, allowing the social impacts of mining to be ignored and extraction to continue unhindered. We use the contentious Ranger uranium mine on Mirarr Aboriginal land in the Kakadu region of the Northern Territory of Australia to illustrate our argument. Information on the negative social impacts of mining on the Mirrar has been available through the life cycle of the Ranger mine. It has been consistently ignored by the State and by the mine's corporate owners, and social impacts remain conspicuously absent in the mining company's mine closure plans and governmental assessments. In an important theoretical innovation we brings Val Plumwood's concept of “shadow places” into conversation with the ignorance studies literature to explore how the practices of ignorance do not just involve the absence of knowledge but are actively mobilised in order to obscure the social impacts of mining on Indigenous lands, and perpetuate long-standing social and environmental injustices in settler colonies such as Australia.

This research explores contestations surrounding the rehabilitation of the Ranger Uranium Mine in the Northern Territory of Australia. I highlight how particular scientific knowledges are privileged throughout the rehabilitation process, but only so long as the rehabilitation problems at hand are deemed manageable. I also argue that the implications of the immense time scales of impacts are being ignored, and the question of monitoring, remediation, and regulation thousands of years into the deep future constitutes a kind of 'uncomfortable knowledge'. Ultimately, I contend that the legacy of the rehabilitated Ranger uranium mine will pose long-term threats to the environment and Mirarr Traditional Owners of the area, and that this slow violence constitutes a kind of unacknowledged environmental disaster, but one which is being disregarded through the active production of ignorance.

In Sweden, extractive industries are placing increasing pressure on the traditional indigenous Sami livelihood of reindeer herding. Consequently, the intersection of indigenous rights and mining-related development in Sweden has become an increasingly contested socio-legal space. In this article, we analyse the extent to which there are meaningful opportunities for Sami reindeer herding communities in Sweden to effectively influence the permit procedures concerning proposed mines, in order to protect their rights and interests. We provide a comprehensive socio-legal analysis that highlights the weak level of recognition of Sami rights and related impact assessments within the mining permitting system in Sweden. We demonstrate the weakness is caused by several factors: an a priori assumption by Swedish authorities that reindeer herding and mining can generally coexist; the lack of a codified Swedish State duty to consult the Sami; the narrow scope and the weak status of cumulative impact assessments in Swedish EIA legislation and practice; and the weak recognition of Sami reindeer herding as a property right during the permit review process under the balancing of competing land uses. Our results highlight the urgent need for legislative reform in Sweden, if the State is to fulfil its international obligations and improve its legal consistency concerning the rights of the Sami as an indigenous people.

Numerous large mines located on Australia's Aboriginal estate(1) are in the process of ceasing production or will do so in the coming decade. Mine closure raises issues of enormous environmental, cultural, social and environmental significance for Aboriginal traditional owners, but these issues have to date received little systematic attention, unlike the question of whether mines should be established in the first place, or the impact on Aboriginal peoples and on country of operating mines. The commonly used term 'mine closure' belies the fact that mining projects continue to have impacts for decades, and in some cases for generations, after mineral extraction ceases. We highlight this reality, drawing on theoretical insights that stress the persistence of mine legacies and placing them in the context of wider debates about environmental and social justice. We illustrate continuing 'postclosure' impacts on traditional owners and the Aboriginal estate. These impacts are unlikely to be addressed through Australia's entirely inadequate regulatory system for mine rehabilitation, or through negotiated Aboriginal-industry agreements, many of which fail to deal with closure issues. Against this background we highlight the need for systematic research on the effects of mine closure on Aboriginal peoples in Australia; for a radical overhaul of Australia's regulatory system, in part to afford a central role to Aboriginal traditional owners; and for mine closure to be afforded a substantial focus in future agreements governing the development of new mines on the Aboriginal estate.

Over the last decade or so, there has been a global shift towards attempts to recognise the rights of indigenous peoples, particularly in regards to extractive activities on their traditional territories. At the same time, however, the extraction of natural resources in breach of indigenous rights, continues to take place at ever increasing rates. Using a case study of Swedish mining industry attitudes to indigenous rights, and specifically that of the principle of Free Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC), the article explores this paradox. Mining companies operating in Sweden do not currently respect or implement the principle of FPIC, and the article illustrates how mining representatives justify and reconcile this. It elucidates how the Swedish mining industry mobilises various, and at times contradictory, discourses, including on the one hand, the complacent rationale that human rights protections are superfluous in Sweden, and on the other hand, the idea that a respect for FPIC would create uncertainty and thereby threaten the existence of the mining industry.

This article examines the implications of undertaking community-based impact assessment (CBIA) in the Swedish context where Indigenous rights receive little recognition and the institutional planning environment is disenabling. It explores how normative biases built into the permitting process for mines ontologically privilege non-Indigenous ways of defining what constitutes relevant impacts. We show how the CBIA, undertaken by an impacted Sami community together with the authors, attempted to challenge these biases by constructing narratives about future impacts from the perspective of the Indigenous community. We also discuss how the research itself became embroiled in contestations over what constituted legitimate knowledge.

The last two decades have witnessed a growing global acknowledgement of indigenous rights, for instance manifested in the 2007 unDeclaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The Nordic countries have all responded to the rights claims of the indigenous Sámi people by establishing popularly elected Sámediggis(Sámi Parliaments) to serve as their representative bodies. Internationally, the Sámediggis are often referred to as ‘models’ for indigenous self-governance and participation. Using in-depth interviews with politicians and civil servants, this article provides the first empirical study of the daily work of the Swedish Sámediggi, with a specific focus on its institutional design as a government agency with dual roles: as an administrative authority under the Swedish government and as a popularly elected representative body of the Sámi people. We examine how these dual roles affect the work of the Sámediggi and if the Swedish Sámediggi safeguards the Sámi right to self-determination.

Using the concept of internal colonisation, this paper aims to demonstrate how current disputes over wind power developments in traditional Saami mountain areas have reignited contestations between Saami people and the Swedish state. It traces the historical continuities in these contestations. It also analyses shifts in the discourses legitimising the state's nonrecognition of Saami rights to land. The paper explores three discursive frameworks that reflect these continuities and shifts. First, it traces contestations over the ownership of 'Crown' (ie, state) land and the paternalistic practices of the state. Second, it explores how a discourse of renewable energy is currently being mobilised to argue that Saami interests must necessarily give way to broader environmental concerns. Third, it analyses how long-standing colonial rationalities are rearticulated through market relations, as the state seeks to construct a pseudo planning market for wind power developments, which necessarily excludes Saami interests. These debates, and the ongoing resistances by Saami people to industrial encroachments on their traditional territories, highlight the fundamentally unresolved relations between the Saami and the non-Indigenous majority society in Sweden.

The Swedish Sami Parliament is both a representative body elected by the Indigenous Sami people and a government agency under the Swedish state. Since its inception, this construction has been critiqued by the Sami people and Swedish governmental commissions alike: the Sami Parliaments dual roles are seen to be in fundamental conflict with one another. This article provides the first empirical study of the political and practical consequences of these conflicting roles. Using in-depth interviews with politicians and civil servants at the Sami Parliament, representatives of Sami organisations, and civil servants at the Swedish ministries, we analyse the extent to which the Sami Parliament is able to perform its role as a government agency. We argue that the dual roles of the Sami Parliament create problems not only for the decision making powers of the Parliament as a government agency, but also constitute a structural obstacle to Sami self-determination.

Using case studies from Australia, Sweden and Finland, and also drawing on examples from parts of Asia, including Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, and Thailand, the thesis explores how state and market actors respond to Indigenous claims and how Indigenous claims are themselves reconstituted through those particular responses. While the duty of protecting Indigenous rights might nominally fall upon the state, we are increasingly witness to the enfolding of market actors and market rationalities in debates concerning Indigenous claims. The research contained in the thesis highlights how a practice of 'passing the buck', or passing of responsibility onto others, is constituted through both market and government relations whereby responsibility for addressing Indigenous claims is shifted from states to corporations, from corporations to states, and from states back to Indigenous peoples themselves. The thesis consists of four articles. Article 1, titled 'Obliging Indigenous Citizens: Shared Responsibility Agreements in Australian Aboriginal Communities' provides a critique of the governmental provision of services to remote Australian Aboriginal communities through quasi-market arrangements. Article 2, titled 'Corporate Social Responsibility, Supply-chains and Saami Claims: Tracing the Political in the Finnish Forestry Industry' explores conflicts over state logging in Saami territories and the construction of the state/market divide in CSR debates over the rights of Indigenous peoples. Article 3, titled 'NGO Campaigns and Banks: Constituting Risk and Uncertainty' studies the negotiated and contested boundaries of markets through debates over the governance of social and environmental risks in the investment banking sector. Article 4, titled 'The Last Frontier? Windpower developments on traditional Saami lands' considers how colonial rationalities constituting the state-Saami relationship are reproduced in new debates over windpower developments in Saami mountain areas.