Navigating the digital transition in the mining industry: Technology adoption challenges and opportunities for sustainable mining practices

The mining industry (MI) constitutes a foundational pillar of global economic architecture, underpinning the provision of critical raw materials indispensable for infrastructural development, energy transition, and advanced manufacturing. Notwithstanding its strategic relevance, the sector remains encumbered by entrenched inefficiencies, safety risks, regulatory rigidity, and escalating environmental imperatives. In this context, the proliferation of digital technologies—ranging from artificial intelligence and automation to Internet of Things (IoT) architectures and data analytics—promises unprecedented operational transformation. However, the uptake of such technologies is frequently stymied by a constellation of multidimensional barriers that are neither isolated nor linear, but deeply systemic and mutually reinforcing. This dissertation undertakes a rigorous, multi-method inquiry to systematically identify, validate, and causally map the key impediments to digital transformation in the MI. Employing a sequential framework that integrates a PRISMA-guided systematic literature review, bibliometric analysis, and classical DEMATEL methodology, the research distills sixteen critical barriers and elucidates their interdependencies through expert-informed influence matrices. The empirical findings of this study delineate a hierarchical structure wherein High Initial Investment, Lack of Top Management Commitment, and Ineffective Regulatory Frameworks emerge as dominant causal antecedents, precipitating downstream constraints such as Resistance to Change, Workforce Skill Gaps, and Cybersecurity Vulnerabilities. Through prominence (D+R) and net causality (D−R) diagnostics, the study furnishes a decision-support architecture that enables prioritization of intervention points within the transformation ecosystem. This thesis thus contributes a methodologically robust and practically actionable framework for both academic and practitioner audiences, offering stakeholder-specific strategic implications to facilitate systemic, phased, and sustainable digital transition in the MI.