We are in the middle of a global mineral arms race—one that risks reproducing the status quo  extractivist model that has defined the fossil fuel era. Expanded mining is being offered as a solution to supply chain insecurity, the energy transition, and fiscal crises. But there is no mechanism to ensure that extracted materials actually serve a just energy transition rather than feeding militaries, AI data centers, or export markets. Without structural change, a “green” transition could become a new chapter of the same story.

For governments, expanded mining is often presented as a solution to a set of problems, from supply chain vulnerabilities and national security to the energy transition and fiscal crises. In addition to being increasingly viewed as essential to geopolitical security and a pathway to economic certainty, mineral development has a new “green sheen” due to its role in the energy transition—renewable energy expansion is increasing demand for energy transition materials such as, lithium, copper, cobalt, and rare earth elements. 

But mining expansion creates just as many problems as it might purport to solve. Metal mining is a global driver of environmental harm, characterized by widespread and often irreversible impacts on land use, water resources and biodiversity, as well as recurrent human rights abuses and violations of Indigenous peoples’ rights. These outcomes reflect broader patterns of extractivism, an economic development model based on largely unfettered resource exploitation with highly unequal distributions of costs and benefits. Concentrated and mass-scale extraction—carried out primarily for export—produces localized harms while the benefits are captured far from the sites of extraction. 

Extractivism: an economic development model based on largely unfettered resource exploitation with highly unequal distributions of costs and benefits.

How do we advance the energy transition without reproducing patterns of extractivism?

Structural economic transformation is necessary to confront the continued growth of resource extraction that threatens ecosystems and rights. We suggest three building blocks of a post-extractivist future, which we draw from a range of scholarly and movement thinking: 

• Minimize extraction, which in practice means reducing demand at the system level (e.g., mass transit over private vehicles, extending product lifespans, investing in shared infrastructure) and expanding supply-side alternatives (e.g., recycling, circularity, above-ground mining). The goal is not cleaner versions of existing extraction, but systems that require less of it.
• Maximize social and economic benefits for the communities bearing the costs of extraction and for commodity-dependent countries structurally locked into extractivist export models. This includes industrial linkages, labour standards, community benefit agreements, and — critically — reform of the international financial architecture that currently forces countries to expand extraction to service debt and stabilise currencies.
• Abolish sacrifice zones and end the designation of some people and places as acceptable collateral damage in service of wider economic, climate, or national security goals. Mechanisms include free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC), no-go zones, UNDRIP, and equity ownership. 

Transforming beyond extractivism requires advancing all three of these goals—not separately, but in lock-step. This is challenging, because these goals can be in direct tension, particularly on a backdrop of vastly uneven playing fields. For example, increasing resource rents like taxes from extractive activities  will allow states to capture more benefits from mines, while the same mine continues to harm Indigenous peoples and infringes on their rights. For some communities, no level of compensation or benefit will justify extraction. Export bans and industrial policy can increase value-added processing and mineral refining to increase a producer state’s capture of benefits, but this can also create pressures to further expand raw material extraction and advance land use change. Mine workers can secure pay increases while communities and governments absorb long-term risks from mining, bearing costs like perpetual water treatment. 

No single solution can upend such an entrenched system of pillage. Across the globe, political struggles are already unfolding across many fronts—from land defense to demands for public transit and efforts to secure community benefits agreements. Alongside a groundswell of actors demanding redistribution and democratization of the staggering concentrations of wealth and power that underlie persistent extractivism, this series of briefs presents strategies for transformational pathways beyond the prevailing extractive paradigm. Each brief translates existing research into concrete, actionable approaches, and the series will continue to expand over time.