The current geopolitical moment favours a binary, zero-sum logic that papers over complexity. So, now more than ever, I feel it is important to acknowledge and articulate the complexity inherent to green energy transitions around the world. Discussions at our workshop bought this point into sharp relief.
Public commentary, and some academic work too, increasingly characterises the mining industry in binary terms: extraction is either being done by ‘good’ Western companies, or ‘bad’ Chinese companies. I spend most of my time working in Indonesia, a country where Chinese extractive investments have grown remarkably in recent years. Much commentary describes Indonesia’s nickel industry as ‘dirty’, ‘dangerous’, and an illustration of China’s nefarious efforts to control the world’s strategic materials. But a point we returned to throughout the workshop is how stories on the ground in these new mineral frontiers are far more complex, both empirically and ethically.
On the one hand, I feel compelled to join what is now a chorus of criticism aimed at under-regulated and destructive mining practices in places like Sulawesi, where Chinese firms dominate. But I feel it’s equally important to challenge the hypocrisy of Western commentary that overlooks long histories of exploitation, violence, and environmental harm in the Global South wrought by Anglo-American mining firms.
As scholars, we have an increasing responsibility to embrace complexity, to talk about how the past continues to shape the present in extractive zones, and to push back against narratives that over-simplify and render extractive actors as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in the service of geostrategic agendas.
More generally, the political economies that depend on extractive industries are inherently complex and raise all sorts of ethical dilemmas. As part of my research, I interact with a range of stakeholders involved in the mining industry in Indonesia, including those who generate private income through corrupt business deals, illegal licensing schemes, extortion, and manipulation of less powerful economic actors. This political economy invariably (re)produces deep socio-economic inequalities and environmental harms.
While such activities cross ethical and legal red lines, this is the complex reality of how extractive economies work in countries where natural resource governance is characterised by weak or informal institutional architectures. The challenge is to, without judgement, observe how and why illicit behaviours become ‘normal’ economic activities in these spaces, viewed by many stakeholders not as transgressions but as legitimate (indeed sometimes the only) ways for local actors to benefit from high-rent industries dominated by national oligarchs or foreign multinationals.
Advocates for a greener future confront an inescapable dilemma: moving away from fossil fuels means a massive increase in mineral mining. This reality generates a range of ethical complexities.
The embrace of a mineral-led energy transition is a boon for the global mining industry. Calls for an urgent expansion of mineral mining to meet green demand puts new political pressure on the regulatory architectures designed to prevent social and environmental harm. In turn, those who advocate for a slower, more considered approach to extraction of these minerals are accused of holding back the transition from fossil fuels. This new reality undercuts the work of environmental social movements around the world, whose long-held goals have been to regulate, resist, or oppose extractive projects.
Our workshop emphasised how the stakes are far higher in the Global South. We know that much of the mining to produce green technologies will take place in resource rich developing countries with weaker regulatory institutions. The risk is that weaning the world off fossil fuel means deepening the inequalities that have long marked mineral supply chains, whereby developing countries dig and ship their mineral ores to the industrialised world to produce higher value goods. These are the ‘green sacrifice zones’ that scholars have identified for years now.
At the same time, international development and global financial institutions increasingly argue that mineral-rich countries in the Global South are well placed to benefit from the coming boom, suggesting the green transition constitutes a golden economic opportunity rather than a sacrifice. These institutions recommend governments attract and discipline foreign investment to grow value-added industries in the mid and downstream. Such recommendations are a departure from, first, decades of advice to just ‘let the market decide’ how supply chains take shape, and, second, the established wisdom that sectoral diversification and labour-intensive manufacturing are key to escaping the resource curse. Instead, low and middle-income countries are now encouraged to double down on their extractive industries. But emerging evidence from Indonesia suggests this strategy benefits firms and foreign investors much more than local economies and communities. It’s a familiar story in which the burdens and benefits of a minerals boom are distributed unevenly within and across countries.
In sum, the core dilemma is that climate urgency is lowering extractive standards and, in some places, deepening resource dependency. And so our core question as scholars is whether and how our research can fortify the work of activists, politicians, and bureaucrats that seek a different path to a greener future.