Participating in the workshop Navigating the Complexities of the Clear Energy Era offered a much-needed opportunity to reflect on the ethical, political, and spatial dimensions of multiple facets of the global low-carbon transition. Through conversations with scholars and practitioners working in different regions, on different minerals and in various supply chain stages, we covered a wide range of issues, from governance to extractive industries themselves to community-level implications. One aspect of my contribution focused on how China’s role in critical mineral supply chains, particularly rare earth elements (REEs), reveals a fractured and contested politics of energy transition. Yet what struck me throughout the workshop was how consistently these fractures appeared across places and cases, from nickel production in Indonesia to wind energy conflicts in Colombia to governance debates in Peru. Our discussions reinforced something familiar to many people in attendance, but I believe essential to continue to firmly underscore that any notion of a low-carbon transition is much more than a technological or economic project. It is a deeply political and social one, shaped by uneven authority, value regimes, and difficult tradeoffs across scales and people.  

My own research approaches energy transition through the lenses of political ecology and resource (geo)politics. Much policy discourse frames decarbonization as a linear problem of scaling technologies and securing mineral input needed for renewable energy. The workshop’s emphasis on complexity helped disrupt the narrative in many ways. For instance, several highlighted how mineral extraction decisions are shaped by much more than demand for “green” technologies, but rather by domestic political economies, regulatory frameworks, and local struggles over land, labor, and environmental protection. So too in my REE research in China, it is clear that domestic mineral governance is not the centralized system presented in geopolitical debates and commentary. Rather, REE production is shaped (perhaps unsurprisingly) by ongoing negotiations among central, provincial, and municipal authorities. Subnational governments often selectively enforce environmental regulations, pursue industrial upgrading, or prioritize local fiscal revenue, resulting in “fractured extraction,”¹ reminding us that what we think of as energy transition unfolds unevenly within states, not only between them. 

Across workshop discussions, I noted three tensions or dilemmas of low-carbon transition that repeatedly emerged. The first concerned tensions between climate urgency and the expansion of extractive industries. Many critical minerals necessary for renewable technologies (like lithium, nickel, cobalt, and REEs) are increasingly framed as indispensable for climate change mitigation. But they are also extracted for many other purposes, including advanced (non-climate) technologies and manufacturing, as well as defense technologies. Booming demand raises a question of whether we are witnessing an energy transition or instead an energy and materials addition. Historically, new energy sources have tended to accumulate in addition to existing ones rather than displace them. While decarbonization is often narrated as “transition,” it frequently operates as addition and expansion.² Regardless of the technological purpose, expanding extraction tends to lead to environmental degradation, labor exploitation, and community tensions if not displacement. As Philippe Le Billon emphasized in his discussions of “green extractivism,”³ decarbonization risks and is reproducing familiar patterns of resource exploitation under new justifications (even if those justifications do not always hold). A second dilemma that surfaced within the workshop involves the geopolitics of supply chains. My own research highlights how the present “critical minerals rush” often exaggerates unilateral dependencies while overlooking deepening patterns of interdependence. For instance, Chia dominates processing for many minerals, but at the same time Chinese firms remain dependent on upstream extraction in the DRC for cobalt or Indonesia or lithium, pointing to the need to understand infrastructural and logistical chokepoints not just limitations to raw mineral supply. A third dilemma that circulated under the surface of many presentations concerned how frameworks define “criticality” itself. In recent work, we argue that policy debates focus too narrowly on a handful of mainstream minerals (lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite, REEs), while overlooking materials with emergent strategic or technological significance. These “minerals at the margins” point to a resource geopolitics that is not a straightforward race for currently dominant materials but a dynamic process shape by technological change and shifting political priorities.⁴  

Engaging with colleagues from diverse disciplines and regional perspectives considerably expanded my thinking on these issues. Several underscored how communities negotiate risk and opportunities, for example, in wind projects in Colombia or nickel production in Indonesia. Equally important is the role of business, transnational governance, and international organizations in shaping or advocating for ethical engagement with energy transition processes—from extraction to processing and manufacturing. While the workshop pointed to layered complexities, there were many lessons to take away. One is an obvious move beyond binary narratives like pro- or anti-mining or viewing particular countries as either villains or saviors. Rather than viewing certain actors as inherently responsible or irresponsible, the workshop encouraged a relational understanding of how multiple actors operate amid emergent and quickly shifting geopolitics and local constraints. It also requires acknowledging how supply chains are structured by historical patterns of industrial development and environmental externalization that cannot be quickly undone. 

I have increasingly explored these challenges through the concept of just-shoring, ⁵ a framework that asks how critical mineral supply chains can incorporate distributive, procedural, and restorative justice across the mineral lifecycle, from exploration and extraction to processing, manufacturing, and recycling. Efforts to diversify supply (like reshoring, onshoring, or friendshoring) must consider whether they genuinely reduce socio-environmental harm or simply relocate extractive pressures.  

My research and thinking have no doubt been amplified by these collective conversations and insights that may be of relevance to policymakers and mineral firms and processors. “Navigation” of the present era, as the workshop title suggests, is about much more than accelerating the deployment of low-carbon technologies of security mineral supply. To navigate is to grapple with the uneven geographies of extraction, the nuances of supply chain politics, and the place-based effects that accompany “transition.” The workshop’s emphasis on complexity and viewing energy transition as a spatial and political project highlights how intertwined “energy transition” is with competing visions of development, geopolitics, and technological agendas.