1121 indigenous communities lack control over land use after mining. Daly et al. (2025) show that traditional land use planning frameworks often marginalize indigenous knowledge and relational conceptions of land. This reveals that social inclusion—consultation, participation, or information sharing with communities and the general population—is insufficient when legal frameworks fail to recognize collective territorial rights, co-decision or veto powers, or the long-term governance functions of affected communities. As a result, current approaches lack legal mechanisms to transform participation into substantive territorial authority, especially in post-mining contexts linked to historical dispossession and power asymmetries. 3.5 Transitions that generate inequality and the risk of new extractivist models. There is growing tension between post-mining transitions, as evidenced in Peru by illegal or informal mining in areas that have already been remediated (the Colquirrumi case). As shown in Table 2, studies reveal that post-mining investments can reproduce or exacerbate inequality (Parsons, 2024) and that “green” or post-development pathways can perpetuate extractivist logic in new forms (Post, 2024; Dunlap, 2024). Technical studies on renewable energy or blue-green infrastructure in post-mining areas (Xiao et al., 2025; Kantor, 2025) demonstrate significant environmental potential, but largely fail to address governance issues related to benefit sharing, land control, and social acceptance. As a result, transitions framed as sustainable or climate-friendly risk becoming new sites of territorial extraction. Consequently, there is no integrated framework that incorporates distributive justice and power relations into post-mining land use governance, which negatively influences long-term outcomes. 3.6 Summary: the need for post-mining governance The deficiencies and gaps identified reveal that current approaches to the post-mining stage suffer from a common structural limitation: they address what needs to be done, such as optimizing land use, planning at the regional level, managing risks, and involving communities, but not how to regulate these objectives through law. The absence of legally constituted decision-making creates a gap that technical planning cannot fill. This diagnosis, based on the comparative analysis summarized in Table 2, lays the foundation for the results presented below, with the guiding principle that post-mining should be rethought as a matter of legal governance of the territories where mining activity took place (or is taking place). 4. EMPIRICAL AND COMPARATIVE RESULTS 4.1 Empirical results identified in the international literature Result 1: Mine closure continues to be regulated as a technical-financial event rather than a territorial transition: Closure plans prioritize regulatory compliance, financial guarantees, and post-closure verification, with subsequent uses appearing as ancillary elements rather than the central focus of regulation. In Peru, the LCM reproduces this approach, as its main purpose is to prevent and control risks arising from the cessation of operations, without configuring closure as a process of post-mining territorial governance understood as a long-term socio-ecological system. Result 2: Effective post-mining planning must occur before closure begins: Studies on regional, landscape, and post-mining transition planning agree that the most sustainable results are achieved when: (i) the definition of post-mining uses is incorporated from the operational phase, and (ii) there is coordination with land use and regional planning instruments (Cooper, 2024; Hood et al., 2025; Sina Amirshenava et al., 2022). This confirms that post-mining governance cannot be reactive and requires regulatory anticipation, temporal continuity, and institutional coherence. In Peru, neither the LCM nor its regulations require advance post-closure land use planning. Although progressive closure is recognized, it operates as an environmental management tool rather than an instrument of land use transition. Result 3: Regulatory fragmentation creates gaps in responsibility and governance: Comparative
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