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Roşia Montana gold mining project is a good example for pointing out both the scientific context and the motivation of our project. This is a large scale mining project with potential trans-boundary effects in case of tailing dams failure which splitted the Romania society in pros (mainly from industry) and cons (e.g. Romanian Academy) from several years and it is still in the impact assessment phase, with no political decision taken. The area has an historical impact from mining activities since the Roman times. In its vicinity there is a closed smelting industry subject to ecological restoration projects (Zlatna area). It is symptomatic that the dispute about the opportunity of Roșia Montana project takes place only in the enviroronmental impact assessment phase (EIA). EIA is the only formal element taken into account, without any reference to other existing formal elements like: strategic environmental assessment (SEA; a SEA has not been performed on the development plans for the mining sector industry at the time of licencing exploration areas), water framework directive (WFD; no implications for the Mureş basin management plan were discussed). There are no quantitative arguments about the strategic impact of the project on the large scale system including it because the needed tools to assess it are missing. From this case study we can identify a problem tackled by our research project, namely the decoupling between the implementation of two formal rules relevant for the management of the natural capital at different scales (EIA and SEA).