Sustainable livelihoods and indicators for regional development in mining economies

• Robust indicators are needed to understand the relationship between mining and development.
• To date, there has not been a consistent evidence-based approach to selecting relevant indicators.
• The sustainable livelihoods (SL) framework provides a sound basis for indicator selection.
• The five capitals for sustaining livelihoods are the central focus of spatio-temporal measurement.
• Adaptable to multiple scales, SL considers stakeholder perspectives in indicator selection.

In recent years, there has been growing interest in identifying robust indicators which demonstrate the links between mining and development. This builds on an extensive body of work in the broad field of rural development, and aims to capture the extent to which mining is contributing to changes in economic, socio-cultural, health, political and environmental conditions. While these indicators are contested on both conceptual and methodological grounds, we argue in this paper that the sustainable livelihoods (SL) framework might offer a more robust means of understanding the interplay between mining and development. The paper traces the emergence of this framework and considers how it might be situated in the context of existing ‘resource studies’ literature, before proposing methodological and conceptual alternatives for understanding the links between mining and development.