Governing India’s bauxite mineral expansion: Caught between facilitating investment and mediating social concerns

•Traces governance processes related to a bauxite mineral project across federal India.•Details the uncertainty of existing procedures with great variability in outcomes.•Analyses the implications of case-by-case governance for mining-affected communities.

This article examines the implementation of social and environmental criteria for a bauxite mining and refining project as a way of understanding wider governance processes around controversial industrial projects in India. It does this by tracing the extent to which decision-making processes have been able to mediate between government support for private investments on the one hand, and social welfare and environmental sustainability on the other. Governance processes take place in a wealth of forums across federal India from the proposed project sites to national expert committees in Delhi. Increased transparency based on freedom of information legislation combined with ethnographic fieldwork allow for a detailed examination of how investment approvals were put into practice in a particular case to almost, but crucially not entirely, facilitate investment. The existence, and even ongoing expansion, of rights for marginalized groups and environmental protection thus continue to be a source of both frustration and hope for more inclusive forms of governance which might improve the social consequences of large-scale mining in India. At present the significant uncertainty which both communities and investors face appear to not benefit anyone other than perhaps the key policymakers who work behind the scenes to facilitate the deals