Striking a Balance : Exploring Regulatory Preferences and Trade-Offs in Marine Environmental Conservation of Mining Activities in Arctic Norway

Sub-marine mine tailings disposal is disputed due to the uncertain long-term effects on marine habitats. As one of few countries still making concessions of sub-marine tailings disposals, Norway faces public outrage and contested social licenses to operate for mining companies. This paper uses data from a discrete choice experiment collected from four Norwegian counties to elicit inhabitants’ willingness to pay (WTP) for environmental and economic attributes connected to renewed mining activities. Multinomial logit and latent class model estimations show a significant WTP for ecosystem conservation and a less significant WTP for local jobs. There are few spatial differences and no clear distance decay. Age and sex significantly influence the class allocation in the latent class model. All results are robust across split-sample experimental variation in the choice architecture of one environmental attribute, one version intended to capture the total economic value and the other to activate and highlight use value. Our findings are relevant for the mining industry regarding the social license to operate, provide public managers and policymakers essential input to social cost-benefit analyses, and add to the modest literature on environmental valuation in mining contexts