ABSTRACT
The political empowerment of land-connected peoples in both developed and developing economies presents a challenge to the extractives sector and sovereign nations that wish to simultaneously foster democratic forms of government and subnational economic development. An innovation in social governance that has developed in response and continues to evolve is Local Level Agreements (LLAs). These are negotiated between resource developers and local land-connected peoples to secure, under mutually agreed terms, consents and regional development pathways. They formalize and dignify direct, collaborative, and transparent interaction between extractive companies and host communities. Many are embryonic, particularly in their implementation, and there is constant innovation in the detail of how they are negotiated and structured to solve particular contextual challenges. While such agreements are endorsed and even required by many governments and multi-lateral financial institutions, this often also involves “top–down” regulatory prescription on format and content. This is a mistake. Greater success and continued innovation will result from restricting regulatory oversight to ensuring there is procedural and distributional fairness, leaving the negotiation of agreement detail to the primary parties.
