Balancing mining contracts and mining legislation: experiences and challenges

This paper considers how to balance bilaterally negotiated mining contracts with mining legislation that applies to all companies. Its backdrop is the perceptionthat mining contracts have become more widely used, especially in less-developed countries. Experiences have been mixed, prompting the questions of whether too much emphasis has been placed on them and whether this has come at the expense of strengthening sector legislation and the wider governance context for attracting investment. Drawing on a roundtable discussion convened for the 2017 Mining Seminar at the University of Dundee's Centre for Energy, Petroleum and Mineral Law and Policy (CEPMLP), the paper lays open the ambiguous discussion on mining contracts and legislation. It first reviews the rationale for the use of mining contracts and then discusses their impact on the stability of investment conditions, the risk of corruption, the administrative burden on governments and on the development of generally applicable mining legislation and regulations, before going on to explore some underlying issues at stake.