Corporate social responsibility and socio-economic impacts in the mining sector: A bibliometric review of local community empowerment and sustainable development

Abstract

This study presents a bibliometric analysis of the scholarly literature on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and its socio-economic implications in the mining sector, with a focus on local community empowerment and sustainable development outcomes. Using the Scopus database, a systematic search yielded 217 documents published between 2015 and 2025, which were then refined into 182 articles and reviews through structured inclusion and exclusion criteria. The study covers three main dimensions: (1) the evolution of mining-related CSR publication trends over the period 2015–2025; (2) the identification of dominant countries, institutions, and authors along with evolving collaboration patterns; and (3) thematic clusters that shape the intellectual architecture of the field, specifically how these clusters reflect the tension between corporate interests and stakeholder rights as theorized by Stakeholder Theory. The analysis was conducted using VOSviewer and the Bibliometrix package in R to map publication trends, author productivity, international collaboration networks, and thematic keyword clusters. The findings show a progressive growth in publications, reaching a peak of 37 documents in 2023, reflecting increasing academic and regulatory attention to corporate accountability in the extractive industries. Five thematic clusters were identified: CSR and indigenous peoples, economic sustainability and the resource curse, artisanal mining and local livelihoods, coal mining and occupational health, and a methodological cluster related to data mining in computer science. The United States and Australia lead in publication volume, while Ghana records the highest citation-per-document ratio. Indonesia, while present in the corpus, exhibits limited citation visibility, indicating significant room for increased global research engagement. The study identified critical gaps, including a dearth of longitudinal CSR assessments, limited multinational accountability research, and underrepresentation of Southeast Asian perspectives as urgent research priorities for advancing equitable mining governance.