By Anabel Marin and Santiago Cunial
The global race for minerals is accelerating. Minerals like lithium, copper, and nickel are increasingly treated as the “new oil” of the energy transition and other global agendas. From critical mineral alliances to supply chain pacts, consumer countries are seeking “secure and sustainable” flows of these resources.
But in mining territories, “sustainable” is too often an empty promise. Recent evidence strongly suggests that without legitimacy, even the most technically advanced projects face roadblocks, reversals, or outright cancellation. Yet legitimacy cannot be built through communication campaigns, tokenistic participation, or compensation alone; it requires transforming how decisions are made and how projects are designed from the ground up.
What resistances on the ground reveal
Argentina and Chile are among the world’s key suppliers of critical minerals. Behind their mineral boom lies a highly contentious sector. Our analysis shows that social resistance to mining is not an occasional disturbance. In both countries, at least half of medium-to-large projects face organised opposition. This is not only about environmental impacts or revenue distribution. It reflects deeper failures in how extraction is governed, including failures that leave communities excluded from shaping the choices that affect their land, water, and livelihoods. The fact that this occurs in two middle-income countries with relatively high levels of institutional development (i.e., Chile ranking among the strongest globally in mining governance) makes these cases even more revealing.
However, resistance can also be productive. In some cases, mobilisation has driven the adoption of new legal norms, such as free, prior and informed consent, progressive environmental regulations, community-led monitoring systems, and project redesigns that reduce impacts or adopt cleaner technologies. These are not only justice-enhancing measures. They can lower risks for investors, improve state access to quality information, and identify unworkable projects earlier. Yet these gains are often ad hoc and temporary, because institutional frameworks rarely embed them as standard practice.
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Why “more participation” is not enough
International organisations from UNCTAD to the OECD have called for greater civic engagement in mining governance. But their recommendations remain largely procedural: consult earlier, disclose more information, create spaces for dialogue. They rarely address how participation can produce material changes, such as shifting the location, pace, or technology of extraction.
Countries like Argentina and Chile, along with many lower-income producers, face mounting pressure to reconcile competing demands for economic growth, environmental protection, and social justice. They must attract investment, expand exports, and meet the mineral needs of the global energy transition. All this while confronting rising mobilisation, entrenched distrust, and legal obligations towards Indigenous peoples. Off-the-shelf consultation models are not solving the problem. What is missing are institutional approaches that both broaden inclusion and enable tangible transformation in projects and policies.
From inclusion to material transformations
Transformative governance in the mineral sector must move beyond participation as a procedural checkbox and embrace it as a driver of material and political change. In Argentina and Chile, participation has largely been confined to late-stage environmental assessments, with little influence over the technological, locational, or operational dimensions of extraction. The result is persistent mobilisation that evolves towards new and broader demands, even after procedural reforms.
Previous research highlights key conditions for meaningful participation: it must start early and continue throughout the policy cycle; engage a broad range of stakeholders, particularly marginalised groups; provide timely, transparent, and accessible information; integrate diverse forms of knowledge; and carry genuine decision-making weight. While these principles are essential, the most potentially transformative lever, co-shaping the technological and operational aspects of extraction, remains largely unexplored. Institutional reforms, though important, are often too abstract to feel tangible for participants. Distributional gains, while more concrete, have been tried and often prove insufficient. A truly tangible option are project-level changes that directly affect livelihoods, such as operational practices, extraction technologies, the pace of operations, or project location. Crucially, experimenting with new technologies or operational models can generate dynamic gains, opening new pathways to extraction with lower environmental impacts, cleaner production, and closer alignment with local priorities.
The case for experimentation
We have no ready-made blueprint for making participation transformative. That is why experimentation is crucial. Policy labs, transformation labs, and co-design platforms, tailored to the realities of mining territories, should be used to test new ways of sharing decision-making power, co-producing knowledge, and guiding technological choices aligned with local challenges.
A new social contract for minerals
The alternatives are costly. Without transformative governance, frustration deepens, disillusion spreads, and resistance hardens. In such contexts, governments may resort to coercion. From violent crackdowns on protests to the militarization of mining regions, these measures may secure short-term approvals but ultimately erode legitimacy, invite legal reversals, and heighten sovereign risk.
This is not only a local governance problem, it is a global risk. The immediate concern is supply chain disruption, but the deeper danger is a spiral of repression and authoritarian drift. These dynamics can travel across borders, as governments who face similar pressures adopt the same coercive shortcuts.
Shared responsibility for legitimacy
For consumer countries, “secure supply” cannot be reduced to diversifying sources or partnering with politically aligned producers. It must also mean co-investing in the institutional capacity of producer countries to manage mineral extraction in ways that are both environmentally and politically sustainable. This means backing experimentation with novel governance approaches and fostering cross-country learning. By doing so, we can identify practical ways for civil society to co-design project and policy choices, ensuring that legitimacy grows through tangible transformations at both the project and institutional levels.
The transition to a green economy is not just a technocratic challenge; it is fundamentally political. Political sustainability will not come from managing dissent but from recognising civil society as a co-architect of the future, and from having the courage to test the institutions that can make this possible. With demand for transition minerals rising and mobilisation strengthening, governments face a clear choice: evolve towards inclusive and democratic pathways or slide into authoritarian shortcuts. The risk of authoritarian escalation is real. The stakes are global.
Note: This article gives the views of the authors, not the position of the EADI Debating Development Blog or the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes
Title Image: taken from the video
Anabel Marín is an economist and policy researcher specialising in the political economy of natural resources, sustainability transitions, and green industrial policy. She is a Cluster Leader at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) and has over two decades of experience leading international research and advisory projects across Latin America, Africa, and Europe. Anabel has advised governments, multilateral organisations, and civil society, and is known for her work on mining governance, innovation, and just transitions. She was awarded the Premio RAÍCES in 2024 by Argentina’s Ministry of Science for her contributions to international scientific cooperation.
Santiago Cunial is a senior policy specialist in development and governance, with a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania. He currently works at the United Nations Development Programme’s Global Policy Centre for Governance, where he leads the Research and Engagement Agenda on Fair Green Transitions. Previously, he worked as a research economist at the Interamerican Development Bank. His research has been published in journals and edited volumes across the United States, Europe, and Latin America, and his work has been supported by prestigious organizations including the Fulbright Commission, the Open Society Foundation, and Fundación Carolina. The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations Development Programme.