Alternative Accountability Mechanisms and Mining: The Problems of Effective Impunity, Human Rights, and Agency

In the absence of a global regulatory system or international legal system to hold multinational corporations to account for their operations in weak-governance zones, a range of internationally applicable alternative accountability mechanisms have emerged under the broad rubric of corporate social responsibility. In Canada a parliamentary report initiated high-level efforts to design CSR accountability mechanisms with respect to the operations of Canadian extractive industries overseas. This paper examines whether these international and national CSR efforts provide for sanction and remedy and assure respect for human rights, and whether they support the agency of affected communities to protect values of importance to them.