Governing Critical-Mineral Transitions Across Climate, Trade, and Justice

Authors

  • Thomas Harris Author

Keywords:

critical minerals, energy transition, trade, environmental justice, supply chains

Abstract

This interdisciplinary review examines governance of critical-mineral transitions across climate, trade, and justice. The organizing question is how supply security can be pursued without displacing environmental and social costs to producing regions. Ten related scholarly sources are synthesized through a decision-centered framework spanning problem definition, mechanism, measurement, evaluation, implementation, and governance. The review does not invent experiments, pooled estimates, or unreported quantitative results. It instead evaluates the strength and transferability of the available evidence, with particular attention to reducing transition risk to a single forecast of mineral demand. The resulting framework links technical or empirical performance to explicit use conditions and identifies tests that should precede wider adoption in energy-transition policy and industrial strategy.

References

  1. Broto, V. C., Baptista, I., Kirshner, J., Smith, S., & Alves, S. N. (2018). Energy justice and sustainability transitions in Mozambique. Applied Energy, 228, 645-655. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2018.06.057
  2. Burke, M. J., & Stephens, J. C. (2017). Political power and renewable energy futures: A critical review. Energy Research & Social Science, 35, 78-93. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2017.10.018
  3. Canelas, J., & Carvalho, A. (2023). The dark side of the energy transition: Extractivist violence, energy (in)justice and lithium mining in Portugal. Energy Research & Social Science, 100, 103096. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2023.103096
  4. Heffron, R. J., & McCauley, D. (2017). The concept of energy justice across the disciplines. Energy Policy, 105, 658-667. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2017.03.018
  5. Martinez-Alier, J., Temper, L., Bene, D. D., & Scheidel, A. (2016). Is there a global environmental justice movement?. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 43(3), 731-755. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2016.1141198
  6. Mirzania, P., Gordon, J. A., Balta-Ozkan, N., Sayan, R. C., & Marais, L. (2023). Barriers to powering past coal: Implications for a just energy transition in South Africa. Energy Research & Social Science, 101, 103122. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2023.103122
  7. Nsafon, B. E. K., Same, N. N., Yakub, A. O., Chaulagain, D., Kumar, N. M., & Huh, J. S. (2023). The justice and policy implications of clean energy transition in Africa. Frontiers in Environmental Science, 11. https://doi.org/10.3389/fenvs.2023.1089391
  8. Owen, J. R., Kemp, D., Lechner, A. M., Harris, J., Zhang, R., & Lèbre, É. (2022). Energy transition minerals and their intersection with land-connected peoples. Nature Sustainability, 6(2), 203-211. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-022-00994-6
  9. Sovacool, B. K., Martiskainen, M., Hook, A., & Baker, L. (2019). Decarbonization and its discontents: a critical energy justice perspective on four low-carbon transitions. Climatic Change, 155(4), 581-619. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-019-02521-7
  10. Srivastava, N., & Kumar, A. (2022). Minerals and energy interface in energy transition pathways: A systematic and comprehensive review. Journal of Cleaner Production, 376, 134354. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2022.134354

Downloads

Published

2026-08-05

Issue

Vol. 1 (2026): Archive

Section

Interdisciplinary Review

License

Copyright (c) 2026 Global Questions: An Interdisciplinary Review

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.