Community-firm contracting has emerged as a widely used tool in the extractive industries, aimed at ensuring local communities receive a share of the value generated from large-scale resource development projects. These agreements typically include provisions for local hiring, educational scholarships, and other community-based benefits. While they appear to promote more equitable value distribution practices, empirical evidence suggests that their outcomes may vary significantly. In light of these mixed results, this study seeks to explore the conditions under which community-firm agreements lead to more favorable outcomes for local communities. To address this, we apply a value-based strategy (VBS) lens to examine when community stakeholders are better able to effectively capture value from their relationship. To do so, we develop a novel longitudinal dataset of 141 Indigenous communities in Canada, each of which is located near a resource extraction project where a community-firm agreement has been established. Using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), we identify specific community configurations that are more likely to benefit from these agreements, as well as those where contracting may negatively affect community wellbeing. Our findings contribute to a deeper understanding of when community-firm agreements may successfully distribute benefits among community stakeholders, leading to more equitable value distribution. Theoretically, this research also sheds light on how stakeholder factors, such as bargaining power and other contextual factors, influence value capture outcomes.
