Mineral products provide essential fuels and raw materials for industrialization and our daily life, but their influences on other aspects of life need to be taken into consideration. While the whole world benefits from mining’s contributions, most of the resulting detrimental impacts on the environment and society fall on the local communities. The participation of the local community is one solution to decrease the risks from community-related problems. Subsequently, the requirements of mining sustainable development can be met. A literature review was conducted on mining sustainability and stakeholder participation, and the shortcomings of existing research and difficulties of further study were discussed in detail. This study covers a broad understanding of mining sustainability from a mining community’s perspective. In addition, it offers a new mining sustainability scope based on the literature review. Besides the balance of economic, environmental, and social aspects, the mine owner and local community have to be engaged in the new mining sustainability scope. This literature review could improve community engagement and help mining companies to better understand local mining communities.

Sustainable mining has received much attention in recent years as a consequence of the negative impacts of mining and public awareness. The aim of this paper is to provide mining companies guidance on improving the sustainability of their sites through effective community engagement based on recent advances in the literature. It begins with a review of the literature on sustainable development and its relationship to stakeholder engagement. It then uses the literature to determine the dominant factors that affect community perceptions of mining projects. These factors are classified into five categories: environmental, economic, social, governance and demographic factors. Then, we propose a new two-stage method based on discrete choice theory and the classification that can improve stakeholder engagement and be cost-effective. Further work is required to validate the proposed method, although it shows potential to overcome some of the challenges plaguing current approaches.

The social responsibility of corporate mining has been challenged by a significant socio-political risk from local communities. These issues reduce shareholder value by increasing costs and decreasing the market perception of corporate social responsibility. Community engagement is the process of understanding the behavior and interests of a group of targeted mining communities through surveys and data analysis, with the purpose of incorporating mining community acceptance into the mining sustainability. While mining organizations have discussed community engagement to varying degrees, there are three main shortcomings in current studies, as concluded in the authors’ previous research. This paper presents a framework to apply discrete choice theory to improve mining community engagement and corporate mining social responsibility. In addition, this paper establishes the main technical challenges to implement the developed framework, and presents methods to overcome the challenges for future research with a case study. The contribution of this research will transform mine sustainability in a fundamental way by facilitating the incorporation of effective community engagement. This will lead to more sustainable mines that local communities support.