Mining Jurisdiction Risk Is Two Numbers, Not One

Nevada posted a perfect 100 on the Fraser Institute's 2025 Policy Perception Index — the highest score any jurisdiction has ever recorded[^1]. Arizona placed in the same survey's top ten[^1]. Neither score tells you that Rio Tinto's Resolution Copper project, in Arizona, has been stalled by permitting and litigation for more than two decades and may not reach production until the mid-2030s[^2]. A jurisdiction-attractiveness ranking and an actual permitting timeline are two different measurements of two different things. Treating them as one number is where jurisdiction risk gets mispriced.

What the perception score actually measures

The Fraser Institute's Annual Survey of Mining Companies, 2025 was fielded between August 5 and November 26, 2025, sent to 2,304 individuals at mining and exploration companies, and drew 256 responses from senior executives whose companies reported an aggregate US$4.2 billion in exploration spending[^1]. Respondents scored each of 68 jurisdictions across 15 policy factors — permitting timelines, taxation, political stability, labour availability, legal-system quality, and others — and those scores are averaged into the Policy Perception Index (PPI). The PPI is then blended with a separate mineral-potential index into the Investment Attractiveness Index, the headline ranking that put Nevada first overall in 2025, up from second in 2024[^1].

Every part of that construction is a forward-looking, subjective average: what executives across an entire industry believe about a jurisdiction's regulatory environment, aggregated across every company and every commodity operating there. It is a legitimate and useful measure — it is also, definitionally, sentiment, not outcome data.

What it cannot measure: what actually happened

S&P Global Market Intelligence approaches the same question from the opposite direction: not what executives expect, but what elapsed time real projects actually recorded. Its July 2026 study tracked 232 mining assets worldwide discovered and brought toward production between 1990 and 2025. The 203 of those that reached operating status took an average of 14 years from discovery to production. The remainder — projects still non-operating, typically stalled at the permitting stage — now average close to 30 years, roughly five times the lead time recorded for projects started in the 1990s[^2]. The study attributes the widening gap primarily to permitting delays and revocations, not financing or construction.

That is backward-looking, project-specific, empirical data, and it captures something a sentiment average structurally cannot: fat-tail outcomes. A jurisdiction can score well on average policy perception while a specific project inside it sits in a multi-decade permitting fight, a court injunction, or an outright license revocation — none of which move the average very much, because most projects in a well-regarded jurisdiction do proceed on a normal timeline. The tail is exactly where the risk that matters to a single-stock investor lives.

Case one: a top-ten jurisdiction, a two-decade project

Resolution Copper sits on the Oak Flat site in Arizona — a jurisdiction that placed fifth on the 2025 Investment Attractiveness Index[^1]. The project has nonetheless been in some form of permitting or legal dispute for more than 20 years, largely over the site's significance to the San Carlos Apache Tribe. A congressionally mandated land exchange was finally recorded on March 16, 2026, and the federal government issued a final Record of Decision authorizing the exchange and related permits — a genuine milestone. S&P Global's July 2026 report nonetheless flags a possible further delay of up to five years, and Rio Tinto's own copper division has said startup could now land in the mid-2030s, versus an original target near 2030[^2]. Arizona's aggregate policy score did not predict this; it describes the typical experience of companies operating there, not the specific legal history of one deposit.

Case two: a license, granted and then revoked

Ecuador supplies the sharper version of the same lesson. DPM Metals' Loma Larga gold-copper project, in Azuay Province, had reached the environmental-licensing stage with a roughly US$419 million capital plan when Ecuador's government suspended the license in late September 2025 and revoked it outright in early October 2025, citing water-protection concerns for the Quimsacocha reserve after a march of roughly 100,000 people[^3]. The revocation happened after the license had already been granted — the kind of event a perception survey, which asks executives about jurisdictions in general rather than about a specific permit's durability, is not built to price in advance.

Loma Larga is not Lundin Gold's Fruta del Norte, and one company's license revocation is not a verdict on another company's permit. But both projects sit in the same national jurisdiction, and the event is a concrete, dated data point on Ecuador's permitting-outcome risk that a static country ranking does not carry. An analyst comparing two Ecuador-based issuers needs both the jurisdiction-level context and the permit-specific facts of each company's own filings — one does not substitute for the other.

What this means for coverage

The MAS-Score Jurisdiction sub-score (15% weight) takes this apart rather than collapsing it into one import. It starts from the Fraser Institute's Policy Perception Index, rebased directly onto our 0-100 scale, and then layers a country-tier modifier, a multi-jurisdiction diversification credit, and a penalty for documented sanctions or resource-nationalism in the trailing 24 months — all still jurisdiction-wide, average-of-many-companies signal. The separate Permitting sub-score (10% weight) is where the project-specific layer lives: it scores a company's actual, current permitting status — from contested through all-secured — combined with jurisdiction stability and that project's own historical timeline-overrun factor. A Resolution Copper or a Loma Larga shows up there, at the company level, rather than nudging a jurisdiction-wide average that most other projects in the same country would barely move.

A jurisdiction ranking is a starting point for due diligence, not a substitute for it. The gap between what a perception score measures and what a permitting timeline actually delivers is exactly the gap coverage has to close, one filing at a time.

References

1. Fraser Institute, Annual Survey of Mining Companies, 2025, published late February 2026. Fieldwork conducted August 5 – November 26, 2025; 2,304 individuals invited, 256 responses from senior mining and exploration executives whose companies reported an aggregate US$4.2 billion in exploration spending. Scope: 68 national/subnational jurisdictions, scored across 15 policy factors into the Policy Perception Index, blended with a mineral-potential index into the Investment Attractiveness Index. Nevada: PPI 100/100, Investment Attractiveness Index rank 1 (up from 2 in 2024). Arizona: Investment Attractiveness Index rank 5.
2. S&P Global Market Intelligence, "Mine Permitting Delays Stretch Timelines to 30 Years," research published July 2026. Sample: 232 mining assets worldwide discovered and brought toward production between 1990 and 2025; 203 reached operating status at an average 14-year discovery-to-production lead time, the remaining non-operating assets now average close to 30 years. Same report's coverage of the Resolution Copper project (Arizona, US): possible startup delay of up to five years beyond the post-Record-of-Decision timeline.
3. Reporting on Ecuador's suspension (late September 2025) and revocation (early October 2025) of the environmental license for DPM Metals' Loma Larga gold-copper project, Azuay Province, Ecuador — capital plan approximately US$419 million. Scope: this single project and jurisdiction; not a statement about any other Ecuador-based mining issuer.