I have, today, signed a contract for a book with Oxford University Press. This is great news. This book is provisionally entitled Risk and responsibility: The politics of mining, corporate social responsibility and development. Though, this may well change as one of the bits of feedback from the reviewers was that they didn’t like the title. (Perhaps I should steal less from Austen for the title. Dickens instead perhaps?).

Almost certainly what the book won’t look like
Here is a brief synopsis from the proposal:
Mining is at a pivotal moment. The recent commodities supercycle, in which mining companies expanded across the globe and boosted their CSR investment and activities, has ended. This expansion created multiple struggles and tension and has increased pressure from investors, national governments, civil society and local communities on mining companies to improve their environmental and social impacts. Expectations of mining company behaviour have been raised and are unlikely to fall. This book examines the drivers and consequences of the recent growth of CSR in the extractive industries. Risk and responsibility brings together literatures in geography, development studies and politics to examine of the political and development impacts of CSR in the mining sector. The book draws on over 200 semi-structured confidential interviews conducted in Canada, Ghana, Peru, USA and Zambia between 2011–2014 focussed on 6 case-study companies, to examine the functions and meanings CSR takes on across different scales of action. At the international level, CSR aims to attract capital and reduce shareholder risk; at the national level, it is used to improve the image of mining companies and curry favour with populations and regulators; at the local level, CSR profoundly reconfigures local political institutions to produce stable operating environments. In the mining industry, strategic pressures have come to be understood through the rubric of risk, for which CSR has come to be seen as the strategic tool which can unite the responses required of companies towards a range of stakeholders. Over eight chapters, Risk and responsibility examines the interplay of risk and responsibility at the heart of the political life of corporations.
It’s a ways off yet. My current best guess would be that it comes out in 2018.