Contested water- and miningscapes – Explaining the high intensity of water and mining conflicts in a meta-study

•Coercion, fragmented social relations, diverging notions of water and no meaningful participation contribute to escalation.•Water scarcity is not consistently associated with high-intensity conflicts and thus does not explain why conflicts escalate.•To understand water and mining conflict, material, political and social-cultural dimensions need to be looked at jointly.•Conflict scholarship has a geographic bias for Latin America and lacks an inside perspective from state and corporate actors.•Fuzzyset Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) provides a robust and replicable method to conduct a meta study.