Relational geographies of risk and responsibility: maintaining Canada’s mining authority across North-South contexts

Recurring crises and contestation threaten the Canadian mining industry’s capacity to present mining as governable and investable. Yet this industry maintains a strong reputation for expertise and responsibility. This paper asks how confidence in Canada’s extractive authority is sustained despite persistent contestation. Through discursive analysis of The Northern Miner, it compares narratives about mining conflicts in Guatemala and Canada to examine how extractive authority and legitimacy are produced within intra-industry discourse. Analysis of news articles (n = 303) traces how narratives differentiate between contexts and what remains consistent across them, organized around three dimensions: attributions of responsibility, representations of opposition, and industry responses to conflict. Canadian mining is constructed as technologically sophisticated, well-regulated, and responsible, while Guatemalan mining is portrayed as conflictual, unstable, and deficient. These distinctions help sustain confidence in extractive authority by organizing a transnational field into hierarchies of expertise, responsibility, and risk. Across both contexts, however, industry actors mobilize discourses of corporate social responsibility as a confidence-building strategy amid contestation. This paper’s contributions to extractivism scholarship are twofold. First, it shifts attention from outward-facing legitimization to intra-industry spaces where authority is narrated and renewed. Second, it extends scholarship on how legitimizing discourses operate globally, beyond individual sites or nations.