Title: The implications of legal pluralism to understanding mining conflicts : A socio-legal study of Thailand’s Chatree gold mine
Author: Mrs.Sara Kimberly Phillips
Year: 2024
Keywords: Legal pluralism; mining conflict; socio-legal research; resource governance;, investor-state dispute settlement; environmental justice
Theme: Environmental Politics and Policy
Advisor(s): Carl Nigel Middleton
The full thesis available here.
Abstract: This thesis explores the conflict surrounding Thailand’s Chatree gold mine through a socio-legal analysis grounded in the conceptual framework of legal pluralism. As mineral extraction becomes increasingly central to global sustainability agendas, including the clean energy transition and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, this research critically examines how competing normative orderings shape actor relations, conflict dynamics, and perceptions of justice in contested mining contexts. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork, including interviews and focus groups, the study investigates how various actor groups engage with, navigate, and seek to reshape largely interconnected normative systems. These systems include formal legal mechanisms, customary and cultural norms, and economic rationalities, and further relate to environmental justice discourses. By analyzing the lifecycle of the Chatree gold mine and the evolution of mining conflict over time, the thesis reveals how actors strategically mobilize these normative orderings to assert claims, influence decision-making, and seek redress.Through this empirical case study, the thesis demonstrates the analytical utility of legal pluralism in understanding mining conflicts and contributes to broader debates on natural resource governance, law and development, business and human rights, and socio-environmental justice. The findings underscore the limitations of dominant governance frameworks, such as corporate social responsibility and social license to operate, arguing instead for a more nuanced and contextually informed approach to justice and sustainability in mining that addresses structural deficits in development decision-making. Such an approach works to reveal how struggles over norms and legitimacy are deeply embedded in localized experiences of harm and competing visions of development. It also demonstrates how actors creatively draw on diverse normative systems to contest mining projects and reimagine what just and sustainable development could look like. In undertaking this work, the thesis advances both methodological and theoretical insights into the role of law and normative contestation in shaping development outcomes