Legal effectiveness of business contracts in tin mining: Socio-legal and governance challenges in corporate–community relations in Indonesia

The governance of mineral resources in developing economies often reveals tensions between formal legal frameworks and informal extraction practices. Indonesia’s tin sector exemplifies this dynamic within broader global debates on artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) formalization and contractual governance. Despite successive legal reforms, including the 2020 and 2025 Mineral and Coal Law amendments, community-based mining remains weakly regulated. In this context, private contracts between mining firms and artisanal miners have emerged as the primary cooperation mechanism, yet their legal effectiveness and fairness remain uncertain. Using a normative–empirical socio-legal method, this study integrates doctrinal interpretation with field data from five tin-producing districts in Bangka and Belitung to examine how contracts are negotiated, enforced, and experienced. The analysis, guided by Friedman’s legal-effectiveness framework, contractual-justice principles, and legal pluralism, identifies four persistent challenges: (1) bargaining asymmetries favoring corporations; (2) limited legal literacy among miners; (3) fragmented oversight; and (4) absence of sustainability and safety clauses. The findings show that informal norms fill governance gaps but fail to ensure substantive fairness or enforceability. Policy reform should promote transparent and standardized contracts, community legal empowerment, and mandatory environmental and social safeguards to strengthen equitable extractive governance in Indonesia and comparable contexts. • Tin mining in Indonesia involves legal cooperation between companies and artisanal miners. • Private contracts are used to bridge regulatory gaps in community-based mining. • Four key challenges affect contract effectiveness, including legal literacy and oversight. • Informal norms supplement law but fail to ensure fairness and sustainability. • Legal reform should improve transparency, enforceability, and community empowerment.