The mining industry manages geotechnical risk across traditionally siloed facilities, including open pits, underground excavations, waste dumps, stockpiles, tailings storage facilities (TSFs), water storage facilities (WSFs), and heap leach facilities (HLFs). This paper reviews the divergent evolution of governance across these facilities since the 2019 Brumadinho disaster and tests it against a compiled failure data set spanning 2014 to 2026, cross-referenced against the World Information Service on Energy (WISE) Uranium Chronology Project and primary forensic sources. TSF and HLF failure frequency show no statistically significant decline since the Global Industry Standard on Tailings Management (GISTM) was introduced. The annual rate changed from 5.8 to 4.2 events per annum, with a rate ratio of 0.73, a 95 per cent confidence interval of 0.44 to 1.22 and a p-value of 0.26. Fatalities fell by an order of magnitude, every post-GISTM fatal TSF or HLF failure (8 of 8) occurred at an operator outside GISTM commitment and fall of ground deaths among International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM) members fell to near zero. The evidence indicates that governance effectiveness is an enabling condition for critical control effectiveness, and that failure mechanisms, whether dam overtopping, a fault-slip rock burst, a drawpoint mud rush or a non-circular slope failure, do not respect the organisational boundaries by which the industry governs them. We examine the organisational, regulatory and physical reasons for the disparity and propose an integrated, first-principles geotechnical governance system spanning all facilities, drawing on high reliability industry practice, with clear accountability, unified risk processes and layered assurance.