A striking finding in the March 2026 report from Leila Kazemi and Anna Bulman, “Thinking Strategically About Mineral Governance Funding: Perspectives on Current and Future Priorities,” is that North America is being practically ignored by mineral governance funders. The United States has more than 20 percent of the mining facilities in ICMM’s Global Mining Dataset, yet of the 380 funding activities, only one was in North America.
The need for funding to improve governance issues among lower-income mineral-producing countries is enormous. But considering weak mineral governance to be an exclusively Global South problem creates a blind spot: wealth and seemingly strong institutions do not guarantee a modern, inclusive mining system.
In fact, when it comes to mineral governance, the United States is stuck in the 19th century. Literally in the days of horse-drawn carriages, cattle drives, kerosene lamps. The Mining Law of 1872 still controls access to minerals on hundreds of millions of acres of public land. Worse, hardrock mining sits outside the land use planning process, denying communities and stakeholders a meaningful say in where mining should or should not occur. Staking new claims and drilling initial exploration holes occur with zero public notification or engagement.
While the U.S. mineral governance system is stuck in the past, the U.S. government is moving aggressively to encourage exploration and development of the minerals of the future. During the past year and a half, the federal government has committed at least $10 billion through grants, loans, offtake agreements, equity purchases, and other support for critical mineral development worldwide, including in the U.S. At the same time, already inadequate public engagement opportunities are being cut even further. The current administration has approved two mines already without issuing draft environmental impact statements, and this is rapidly becoming the new normal. The result is not faster or better development: it’s more risk of preventable conflict, poorly designed projects, a lack of public legitimacy, and ultimately a slower process of obtaining the minerals for the clean energy transition.
Indigenous communities are hit particularly hard. A 2022 study found that 61 percent of U.S. mining projects are within 10 kilometers of Native American land. Tribal Nations must deal with hundreds of thousands of unremediated abandoned mines contaminating their current and ancestral lands while getting as little as 30 days to review new mining plans that run thousands of pages. Tribal Nations are expected to confront this new wave of development with chronically underfunded governments, limited access to independent expertise, rushed and fragmented consultation, and little power to ensure their concerns shape the outcome. The recently proposed rewrites to National Historic Preservation Act regulations would further restrict Tribal input. The U.S.’ status as a wealthy nation does not lessen the stakes or the impacts. As elsewhere in the world, poor mining governance in the U.S. violates Indigenous rights, threatens community health and culturally significant places, and often leaves Tribes with no other recourse than a long and expensive court battle.
With increasingly lean bilateral aid budgets focused elsewhere, this creates a clear role for philanthropy. While I was at the Department of the Interior under the Biden administration, I helped lead an interagency workgroup that developed recommendations to improve mining on U.S. public lands, informed by input from hundreds of organizations and individuals, including dozens of Tribal Nations and Tribal members. The working group’s recommendations, and capacity gaps identified through that process, point to several ways that relatively modest philanthropic investments could make a substantial difference:
Fund independent technical assistance for communities, Tribes, and local governments, giving them access to the expertise needed to independently evaluate complex mining and reclamation plans.
Establish a tribally governed critical minerals center of expertise that can assist Tribes with consultation, share tools and learning across Tribal Nations, and assist Tribes in negotiating benefit agreements and, if desired, ownership stakes. Canada’s First Nations Major Projects Coalition is a useful model.
Provide multi-year support to civil society organizations. Few U.S. NGOs maintain expertise on mining, meaning there is little capacity for independent technical analysis, or engagement as major policy changes advance in Congress.
Support coalition-building efforts that connect organizations with a stake in how U.S. mining gets done, such as conservation groups, Tribal Nations, clean energy advocates, rural communities, labor, and companies that want a workable permitting process, allowing them to share information and engage with decision-makers more effectively.
Close gaps in foundational research and data. Open data, policy research, and independent analyses can make critical mineral decisions more transparent and evidence-based.
A better-governed U.S. mining sector will improve environmental and social outcomes and accelerate development of critical minerals by reducing the conflicts that lead to delayed permits and drawn-out court battles.
Philanthropy can’t modernize the U.S. mining law or fulfill the government’s obligations to affected communities. But it can ensure those communities have the capacity they need to shape the decisions that affect them. The United States is making mining decisions with a 19th-century law and a decaying public process. Philanthropy shouldn’t sit this one out.
Read more about the "Dialogues on Mineral Governance Funding" series