The effect of community consultation on perceptions of a proposed mine: A case study from southeast Australia

Consultation is the predominant method of community engagement in infrastructure development. Therefore, understanding stakeholder interactions within consultation is critical to acquiring a social licence to operate. While previous research has focused on the factors which contribute to this social licence, little work has been conducted on how mining company consultation strategies influence perception formation. We explore how stakeholder expectations and experience of consultation impact perceptions of proposed mining projects. We undertook a case study of a proposed, large-scale, mineral sands mine in rural Australia using an open and closed-question questionnaire (n =32) and semi-structured interviews (n =20). We find that there are multiple, diverging understandings of the purpose of consultation both within and between stakeholder groups. The community experience of consultation drove negative perceptions of the proposed mine due to procedural and personal factors. We find several overlaps with the renewable energy (RE) literature, including: calls for two-way communication, (mis)trust of professional stakeholders, and the need for consistent and well-timed consultation. Other factors are not as common in the RE literature, and may be more specific to mining, such as stakeholder disenfranchisement misunderstood as apathy, calls for community involvement in agenda setting, the need for careful selection of company representatives, and the importance of meeting stakeholder expectations of consultation.