Stakeholder engagement-based evaluation of social sustainability with respect to the mining sector

The mining sector exploits the non-renewable natural resources and supplies them to the industry and energy sector. Hence, it has considerable share in the national and local economies of the large number of countries.Besides... [ view full abstract ]

The mining sector exploits the non-renewable natural resources and supplies them to the industry and energy sector. Hence, it has considerable share in the national and local economies of the large number of countries.Besides the economic impacts, the sector has impacts on environment, and society. Therefore, effective integration of the environmental, social and economic dimensions of sustainability into the decision-making in the mining sector promises contribution for the achievement of the sustainable consumption and production patterns. However, quantitative evaluation of the social impacts, exposed by the local communities, is not performed as effectively as the environmental, technical, managerial and economic issues. In this regard,the paper discusses if and how much the mining sector contributes to enhance the social sustainability in the mining communities in terms of social impacts of the operations based on the quantified parameters. For this purpose, a local stakeholder engagement-based methodology is proposed for quantification and integration of the social parameters into the assessment and decision-making of the mining sector planning. The methodology is applied with a case study in Afşin-Elbistan Coal Basin (AECB) in Turkey. The case study shows that quantitative integration of the social parameters is significantly important to evaluate the negative and positive impacts of the mining sector on the social sustainability at the local-level. Moreover, it is observed that participation of the local communities into the assessment process make the social sustainability concept tangible and it prevents to use de facto social sustainability criteria for different cases.