The “mining renewal“ policy in metropolitan France, which emerged in the 2010s, encountered fierce critics. They live on the rising power of territorial and environmental mobilizations, leaving industrial and developing projects governance short of breath. Defined as a problem of social acceptance by the major actors supporting mining renewal, they lead the latter to implement tools for governing its critics. This article studies three of these tools (participative, sociometric, communicational) and their underlying frames of reference : environment and territory. The participative tool’s failure shed a light on the incompatibility between civil society’s stances on one side, and administrative and productive actors on the other side, leading to the persistence of corporatist reasoning in mineral resources’ governance. The increasingly fine apprehensions of territory and the world’s social diversity carried out by sociometric tools have also proved insufficient for a better acceptance of mining projects. If the communicational tools’ effect need time to be fully grasped, one can speculate their feeble impact on mining renewal contestations, because of their particularities. Thus, tools for critic’s government do not declare war on the mining industry’s underlying economic (capitalist and extractivist) paradigm, while critics profoundly call extractivism into question (as an economic model based on resource extraction and as a political regime resting on the hoarding of common goods).