This paper offers a comparative analysis of the governance regimes under which large-scale mining occurs in three territories/countries of the Southwest Pacific, and the associated implications for communities affected by these operations. It extends the argument regarding the need to contextualize mining operations within their geographic and cultural settings, to emphasize the effects of the political realm, and particularly the relationships between the way local populations are engaged with and affected by large-scale mines under the strongly contrasting state-making processes in the region. We argue that the context-specific nature and terms of this state-making process play a fundamental role in shaping the very diverse outcomes for mining-affected populations and territories in Papua New Guinea, Papua Province in Indonesia and under two distinctive political circumstances within New Caledonia (the pro-independence Northern and anti-independence Southern provinces). Different resource governance regimes emerge from the interactions between the various actors involved in the mining arena. We discuss the notion of the “enclave economy”, which is structurally linked with the functioning of the extractive sector. We address the effectiveness of the mining enclave in each of the different cases, and the political and administrative levels at which enclaves are (or are not) located or connected. State-making processes and governmentality are analysed from this vantage point, in terms of the varying degrees of disconnection between these different levels of enclave or form of linkages with local and national arenas.