Who’s in Charge? Avoiding Human Rights Responsibility in Zambia’s Copper Sector

Sammanfattning

This thesis investigates how human rights responsibility is constructed and negotiated between the Zambian state and foreign mining companies in Zambia’s mining sector under conditions of economic dependence on foreign investment. The study is motivated by observations from an internship in Zambia, where mining was consistently framed as central to development while questions of responsibility remained unclear. Against this background, the study asks how the Zambian state and foreign mining companies articulate and negotiate human rights responsibilities within Zambia’s mining sector. While existing research has examined mining governance and corporate responsibility, less attention has been paid to how responsibility is discursively distributed between actors in resource-dependent contexts. The study analyses policy documents, corporate reports, and international assessments from 2019–2025 using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Bacchi’s WPR approach. The findings show that human rights are not constructed as a primary problem within mining governance, but are instead embedded within broader narratives of economic development and investment. Responsibility is systematically displaced, as both state and corporate actors emphasise the limits of their own roles while shifting responsibility onto the other. This produces a governance dynamic in which accountability is fragmented and diffused rather than enforceable, highlighting how economic dependence shapes the ways responsibility is articulated, negotiated, and constrained within Zambia’s mining sector.