IRMA at the 2026 International Bar Association ESG Conference
I was honored to be invited to speak at the International Bar Association IBA’s annual ESG conference in Paris in late March. I am grateful to conference chair John Vellone for the invitation, and his colleagues from the IBA for the organization and coordination.
I spoke on the panel organized by the Energy, Environment, Natural Resources and Infrastructure Law Section (SEERIL) of the IBA; this year it was dedicated to Responsibility in Mining. I was joined on the panel by Laura Rich (Marlow Global), and Lachlan Poustie (A&O Shearman); moderated by John Vellone of Borden Ladner Gervais LLP (BLG) and J. Michael Showalter of ArentFox Schiff. It was a great panel, with a real exchange and counter opinions.
On the panel, I emphasized that, regardless of the ethical and moral considerations of mining operators and their partners, responsible mining is an imperative for anyone who wants to establish predictability in the socio-environmental –and therefore economic and legal– performance of a site. Unless you bluntly operate outside the law, the long-term viability of your asset will be conditioned by how responsible you are towards rightsholders and stakeholders.
After all, if the local/central authority determines that there is something wrong with a mine, or identifies regulatory noncompliances, in most jurisdictions there will be procedures to challenge the decision, with written rules that are supposed to be predictable. You can send your lawyers in. But if there is social unrest because you have exhausted the water table and there is no potable water left for people, road blockade because local content promises are not fulfilled, workers on strike because their wages are low or the rate of fatalities is too high… lawyers will be less useful, and so will engineers.
We panelists discussed other challenging topics, such as:
- What are linkages between legally-binding licenses granted by governments and social acceptance (often framed as an informal ‘social licence to operate’, although there seems to be gradually more community-benefit agreements, good-neighbor agreements, or other forms of binding agreements being signed between operators and local populations), what are the legal and commercial consequences of losing them?
- Governments are under pressure to fast-track critical mineral projects in the name of energy and national security, what are the legal and non-legal risks of fast-tracking?
- How good can deregulation be when the minerals sector seems to suffer from a lack of economic and industrial predictability? What does this mean for access to capital?
- And what about anti-corruption, that may have been overlooked in both regulatory regimes and voluntary standards (as pointed out recently by NRGI)?
Conference chair Vellone summarized later
“We convened at a moment when ESG has become a political flashpoint. But our two days together show that lawyers around the world continue to follow a body of legal obligation despite political weather. The topics we discussed are hard law, and they are our clients’ and colleagues’ reality right now.”
