In the Shadows of Climate Change Mitigation: The Politics of Extraction for a Just Energy Transition
About the Project
International efforts to tackle climate change are leading to a global surge in demand for 'critical metals' - so named for their strategic material value in the low-carbon energy sector writ large, and especially for batteries in electric vehicles and electricity storage. Primary among these critical metals is lithium, for which global demand is projected to grow fivefold by 2025 (Ellsmoor, 2019). Feeding this demand is a global network of mining and extractive processes whose most destructive (and least documented) effects are happening at the far ends of the value chain -- i.e., extraction and disposal. The proposed research seeks to understand the consolidation and contestation of lithium mining in five of the world's principal lithium-bearing countries: Australia, Canada and the "lithium triangle" of Argentina, Bolivia and Chile. Importantly, the work will study these processes in the context of two very different forms of llithium extraction: hard-rock mining and brine evaporation.
Through comparative research across these regions and socio-technical landscapes, the research will pursue two inter-related empirical questions and objectives.
1. How are states governing this process? A principal aim here is to document the institutional arrangements that have been put in place for regulating access, exploration, extraction and accumulation within the lithium sector. This will entail investigating the material and political conditions under which extraction processes and impacts have been governed and regulated in Australia, Canada, Argentina, Bolivia and Chile.
2. What accounts for political variation? A principal aim here is to explain how and why countries with comparable material conditions (e.g. pegmatite and salt flat) vary in terms of global integration and capital accumulation. A working hypothesis is that the integration and regulation of domestic and international capital will vary with the degree to which political interest groups and coalitions are able to organize and influence executive, legislative and judicial decisions within the sector.
Our work to fulfil these empirical objectives will break new ground in the study of governance, commodities and the implications of lithium mining for just and low-carbon energy transitions. Theoretically, we are driving toward a more critical conceptualization of the geopolitics of renewable energy by bringing into dialogue contemporary theories of international political economy, economic geography, and materiality as they relate to extractivism and sustainable development. Methodologically, the work will establish a framework for comparative approaches to the study of extractivism and national economic development (international political economy) and across very different forms of extractivism that produce the same raw commodity (materiality). Practically, we will generate actionable insights for planners, vulnerable populations and political movements that are aiming to ensure a 'just' transition to a low-carbon energy system in five of the world's principal lithium-producing regions.