Knowledge Gaps about Mining Impacts on Sami Lands

In the context of the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act, which prioritizes mineral extraction and imposes time limits on project approvals, there have been a surge of policy proposals that aim to expedite licenses for green industry projects. Meanwhile, the academic literature largely overlooks risks for Indigenous Sami rights and reindeer herding. In this paper, we examine if a similar knowledge gap exists in a key part of the practitioner literature informing licensing decisions for new mines, namely environmental impact assessments (EIAs). To do so, we undertake a comparative synthesis of results from i) unpublished findings from a review of selected EIAs from mining companies in Sweden, and ii) a review of Sami knowledge about impacts at two mining sites in Sweden. Findings reveal a considerable mismatch between predicted impacts in corporate EIAs and those impacts experienced by herding communities. Using an epistemic justice lens, we argue that this knowledge gap is no coincidence—instead it reflects an epistemic injustice underlying European and hence Swedish minerals policy and its ambitions to fast-track licensing and exploit Sami lands in the name of the green transition.