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Global Questions: An Interdisciplinary Review

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

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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.

Keywords
critical mineralsenergy transitiontradeenvironmental justicesupply chains
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Publication details
Journal
Global Questions: An Interdisciplinary Review
Volume
1 (2026)
Article number
gq20260002
License
CC BY 4.0