Large investments in natural resource extraction can contribute significantly to sustainable development, through revenue generation, infrastructure development and technology, and capital transfer, among other channels. Despite this, the manner and extent to which these benefits actually accrue to the host countries depend heavily on the policies and practices of such countries and the extractive companies. This is because the well-known “resource curse” can become a reality if the benefits of the mining sector are squandered through overvalued exchange rates and mismanagement of the revenues. Likewise, in the absence of fiscal mismanagement or poor governance, there can be missed opportunities for leveraging large investments in the mining sector to maximise the development impact of the investments for current and future generations. As such, fiscal policies need to always strike a balance between protectionism and nurturing competitiveness, so that the growing mining sector can benefit from major investments and transfers of technology and know-how. Nonetheless, the lack of information about the sharing of mining resource rent between the host governments and investors is an easy statement to make for developing countries. As the existing datasets are often insufficient for a deep analysis of their tax laws as applied to the mining sector, which has limited the academic and operational approaches. In this regard, the paper assesses the modes of balancing fiscal flexibility and predictability in designing and initiating the bargaining process for sustainable contracts in the extractive industries, with a special focus on the trends and challenges associated with the legal framework and tax regimes applicable in the mining sector of Cameroon. On this base, the three major innovations identified are - an inventory of taxes and duties payable during the prospecting phase and mining phase of the project, a new mining code covering the link between each piece of tax information, and its legal source. These illuminate the key points in the mining lifecycle where the fiscal policies can be most effective, as well as providing the road map identifying the key steps to develop effective fiscal policies to strike the balance between investment and sustainability.