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Recent publications

How Latin America can harness the white gold rush

The world needs lithium more than ever. Between 2017 and 2022, the energy sector tripled its demand for the element often referred to as ‘white gold’. One of the ‘critical raw materials’, lithium is essential for the energy transition required to restrict global warming to 1.5C this century. The enormous reserves of what is South America’s ‘Lithium Triangle’ – where Argentina, Chile and Bolivia meet – offer these Global South countries the prospect of significant economic gains. But exploiting their lithium riches will require deft public policy and wise handling of billions of dollars in foreign investment over the coming decades.

The new geographies of an energy transition. A challenge or a developmental opportunity?

In the current global and regional context of capitalist development, the transition to clean technologies has emerged as the overarching solution to the crisis. ‘Critical raw materials’ (CRMs) are also known as technology or minor metals, extracted in smaller quantities that are widely used across a range of intermediate and final output manufacturing sectors. The chapter seeks to examine the place of Latin America in this emerging global value chain, and the extent to which a renewed industrial strategy can be crafted to enable regional governments to take advantage of this new boom in resource production.

The advance of the state and the renewal of industrial policy in the age of strategic competition Many developing countries have recently adopted a swathe of development strategies ranging from extremely selective to non-discretionary, functional policies – some if not all of which constitute what we may term ‘industrial policy’. The collection provides an overview on the state of the art about new industrial policy and the place of politics in contemporary analysis of state intervention in the global political economy. This introduction revisits the importance of state-backed economic policies not simply as a reaction to the limitations of market reforms implemented in the 1980s and 1990s, but as a radically new development strategy moving on to the twenty-first century.
Recentring industrial policy paradigm within IPE and development The article makes the case for a distinctive intellectual tradition of the industrial policy paradigm to examine state strategies in the twenty-first century. Specifically, it outlines three key lessons for political economy scholarship: first, it points to the need to study complementary institutions and the longer-term horizon in political cycles; second, it notes that scholars must seek innovative methodologies in examining sectoral development; and, third, it calls for a rethinking of state capacity in the new phase of globalisation, marked by strategic competition and neo-mercantilism. In so doing, the article opens a new research agenda for the next generation of scholars focussed on how industrial policy might help – or fail – to promote the creation of new comparative advantages and the advancement of internationally competitive firms and sectors, and, importantly, to deliver better quality of life for citizens in most of the Global South.
Governance amidst the Climate Crisis and Energy Transition in the 21st Century Major changes within the macro-political and economic realms are not insulated from the crisis of climate governance. Faced with uncertainty and crisis, Western governments promote the unprecedented drive to reduce carbon emissions during the Anthropocene. While global emissions still require slowing down, the global governance architecture overseeing climate policies falls short in securing a pathway towards energy transition – that is, away from fossil fuels-intensive growth – for many countries. In this context, environmental governance is a focal point to understand how moments of crisis can yield transformative political action.
Mining Our Way Out of the Climate Change Conundrum? The Power of a Social Justice Perspective The tide is shifting away from fossil fuel dependency in favour of clean technologies. However, an uncritical embrace of clean technology may also lead to greater inequalities and uneven development. Importantly, the  transatlantic economic powerhouses share a common vulnerability—that China’s monopoly over critical raw materials might pose a threat to not only the United States’ and European Union’s long-term economic viability but also their ability to effectively secure the minerals necessary for a worldwide transition from fossil fuels toward low-carbon, renewable energy technologies.

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Geographies in Transition: Mining-based development and the EU’s critical raw materials strategy

Though it failed to resolve a number of contentious issues, the COP26 meeting in Glasgow solidified a consensus around the need for a global transition to clean energy. Implicated in this transition is the wide-scale adoption of renewables: we must build larger wind turbines, produce more electric vehicles, and phase down coal factories in electrifying rapidly growing cities. Climate negotiations often refer to the “common but differentiated responsibility” that countries bear in promoting this transformation. But in reality, its protagonists are European governments and high-tech manufacturing companies involved in the production of renewable goods. And their policies have a cost—if the world meets the targets of the Paris Agreement, demand is likely to increase by 40 percent for copper and rare earth elements (REES), 60–70 percent for cobalt and nickel, and almost 90 percent for lithium over the next two decades. In what follows, I examine the green transition both as an opportunity and a challenge for resource-rich countries in the Global South. Importantly, I argue that we need to look beyond traditional growth-oriented industrial policies and the successful “catch up” of East Asian economies to develop inclusive and sustainable green development.

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