Extractive governance and normative diversity: corporate trajectories in Latin American large-scale mining

This article examines why the transnational horizon of relatively homogeneous mining reforms resulted in differentiated institutional and corporate trajectories in Latin American large-sale mining in 1990–2013. From a comparison among Chile, Argentina, and Brazil, the study analyses three emblematic corporate trajectories – CODELCO, YMAD/Alumbrera, and Companhia Vale do Rio Doce – as analytical windows to observe how an external repertoire opening to investment, regulatory stability, and later socio-environmental densification was unevenly translated. The article combines a compared multi-case design with a normative and documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews with actors from the public and private sectors and the civil society. The argument claims that the institutional diversity observed cannot be explained by only one factor, but by the interaction among international influence, historical legacies, and domestic agency, mediated by diffusion and translation mechanisms. Results identify three extractive governance patterns: convergent in Chile, hybrid in Argentina, and divergent in Brazil. The main contribution of this article is showing that the circulation of regulatory models does not result in convergence and institutional translation offers a more accurate analytical key to explain Latin American mining arrangement heterogeneity. This argument also allows interpreting the regulatory challenges of the new extractive cycle associated with critical minerals and energy transition to a greater extent.