ABSTRACT
Mineral development can create new communities and bring wealth to those already in existence, but it can also cause considerable disruption. New projects can bring jobs, business activities, roads, schools, and health clinics to remote and previously impoverished areas, but the benefits may be unevenly shared, and for some they may be poor recompense for the loss of existing livelihoods and the damage to their environment and culture. Exploration increasingly occurs in remote regions with little or no development. Interactions between the mine and community should add to the physical, financial, human, and information resources available— not detract from them. Indigenous communities may work in a mine, and therefore be occupational communities too, while long-distance commuting, as is the case in fly-in, fly-out operations and operations that rely on migrant labour, may mean that occupational communities do not live near the mine.
