As mining activity generally occurs far away from metropolitan areas, governments tend to forget the problems that communities in mining regions face. Centralized government systems and, more importantly, a lack of a robust understanding of the effects of mining impacts on communities and regions, explain in part the lag of development in mining regions and countries. This paper discusses these aspects and introduces eight different papers (comprising the Special Issue: Territorial development and mining in Chile) discussing the impacts that mining activity brings to local economic activity and societal outcomes using the case of Chile, one of the most important mining countries in the world. We conclude this invitation to a territorial turn in the study of mining-based economic development with a set of key research topics we believe would benefit from further research to improve our understanding of the temporal and spatial dynamics between mining activity and development across territories.
