Do voluntary corporate actions improve cumulative effects assessment? Mining companies’ performance on Sami lands

•Governments rely on companies to assess and mitigate cumulative impacts.•Voluntary corporate actions generally fail to deliver on these expectations.•Governments should step up regulation on cumulative effects assessment.•Indigenous communities should have mandates to lead assessments on their lands. Cumulative effects assessment (CEA) remains an Achilles heel in the licensing of mining projects on indigenous lands globally, but especially in the European North. Yet, rather than legislating on indigenous rights and CEA failures, governments tend to rely on companies to mitigate cumulative impacts through new corporate social responsibility actions. This paper considers if these voluntary actions improve companies’ CEA performance and so provide grounds for indigenous communities and decision makers to trust the industry more. Findings are presented from a systematic review of corporate impact assessments for 56 mining concession permit applications on Sami lands in Sweden. We show how companies that adopt additional voluntary measures provide somewhat richer assessments. Overall, however, the performance remains poor also for ‘frontrunners’, with persistent lack of clarity on methods and limited analysis of consequences, social and cultural impacts and interactions with other (past, present or future) projects. We conclude that progress in voluntary actions in regard to assessing cumulative impacts has only led to cosmetic improvements in CEA performance. We therefore argue for stronger regulatory role of government and recognition of the right of indigenous communities to lead or co-manage impact assessments on their own lands.