Extended commentary from Cristian Parra, Principal Economist, and Paola P. Tacchini, Project Manager & International Relations Advisor.
GeopoliticsCritical minerals have become strategic assets for industrial autonomy and global power. Eight structural challenges will determine whether resource-rich countries convert today's mineral boom into lasting development.
Read analysis →Close ↑Mining has become one of the most strategically relevant pillars of the 21st-century geopolitical landscape. In a world defined by industrial competition, fragmented supply chains, and the race to secure inputs for advanced manufacturing, critical minerals such as copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt, rare earth elements—have acquired a significance that extends far beyond economics. They are now essential for industrial autonomy, technological infrastructure, and the manufacturing competitiveness of advanced economies. Mining must therefore be understood not merely as an extractive activity, but as a structural component of global economic power.
Major industrial powers—including the United States, the European Union, India, Japan, South Korea, and China—are implementing strategies to secure stable access to critical minerals, strengthen processing capabilities, and reduce supply chain vulnerabilities. This global realignment creates a historic opportunity for resource-rich developing economies: to position themselves as strategic partners and capture long-term benefits, provided they have strong institutions, strategic clarity, and negotiation capacity.
The first and most fundamental challenge is conceptual: not all buyers, investors, or trade partners are geopolitical allies. Resource-rich countries must distinguish between:
This differentiation is essential to avoid asymmetric dependencies and to negotiate agreements that generate national capabilities rather than perpetuating extractive enclaves.
A modern alliance architecture must move beyond the traditional model of extraction and primary export. Industrial powers seek supply security; producing countries seek investment, technology, infrastructure, and productive capabilities. This complementarity enables a new generation of strategic agreements based on:
The strategic imperative is diversification: no single partner can—or should—dominate a country's industrial future.
Global competition for critical minerals demands regulatory stability, clear investment rules, and efficient permitting systems. Legal uncertainty, administrative discretion, and prolonged socio-environmental conflicts undermine competitiveness and deter long-term capital. Countries that fail to modernize their institutional frameworks risk being excluded from emerging strategic alliances.
Capturing value requires advancing into more complex stages of the value chain. Without investment in technology, human capital, innovation ecosystems, and an enabling regulatory framework, producing countries remain trapped in low-complexity industrial structures. The challenge is to build capabilities in processing, refining, advanced materials, and technology-intensive services (METS).
Mining must be embedded within a broader development strategy that connects industrial policy, energy planning, education, and infrastructure. Without a systemic vision, natural resources cannot be transformed into socioeconomic prosperity or permanent productive capabilities. Mining policy cannot operate in isolation; it must be part of a national project.
Geopolitical competition for critical minerals has intensified global scrutiny of environmental performance, community relations, and fiscal governance. Producing countries must strengthen:
Social legitimacy is not a secondary requirement; it is a strategic condition for operational continuity, investment attraction, and international competitiveness.
The central challenge is converting finite resources into lasting national capabilities. This requires:
Transforming non-renewable resources into long-term prosperity is fundamentally a challenge of strategic governance.
The global mining landscape is increasingly shaped by industrial rivalry, export controls, and competing standards. Producing countries must develop the capacity to:
Strategic autonomy depends on the ability to operate in a fragmented, competitive, and politically charged global environment.
A realistic challenge, often underestimated in political discourse, is the macroeconomic vulnerability inherent to commodity-dependent economies. Senior economic analysis shows that:
A credible mining-geopolitical strategy requires macro-fiscal frameworks that stabilize revenues, smooth expenditure, and protect long-term investment in productive capabilities. Without macroeconomic discipline, even the best geopolitical alliances cannot translate into sustainable development.
Geopolitics has redefined the global value of mining. Critical minerals are now strategic assets for industrial development, technological autonomy, and international influence. Developing economies have a historic opportunity to build diversified alliances with the United States, India, the European Union, Japan, South Korea, China, and other industrial powers.
But this opportunity will only materialize through strong institutions, transparency, strategic vision, and mining policies aligned with long-term industrial development. Mining can become a powerful engine of sustainable prosperity, if it is managed with geopolitical intelligence, macroeconomic discipline, and intergenerational responsibility.
ImpactAround 75% of extractive-industry GDP in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America is generated where poverty exceeds 20% — a structural paradox the sector has yet to resolve.
Read analysis →Close ↑Around 75% of Extractive Industry GDP in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America is generated in countries or regions where more than 20% of the population lives in poverty, and 50% of that GDP comes from areas where poverty exceeds 40% (2020). This reveals a structural paradox: the territories that sustain a significant share of global mineral supply chains are also those facing the deepest socioeconomic deprivation.
In principle, mining development strategies should be designed to improve socioeconomic conditions in the areas of influence—through fiscal revenues, employment, infrastructure, and productive linkages. In practice, this alignment remains weak, creating a persistent gap between the economic value generated by mining and the lived reality of local populations.
Below are the key structural challenges this disconnect creates for the mining industry.
Despite the sector's economic weight, mining has not translated into broad-based and sustained socioeconomic improvements. Fiscal revenues are often centralized, direct employment is limited, and local supply chains remain shallow. This weak articulation undermines the sector's social legitimacy and reduces its contribution to territorial development.
In recent years, many large mining companies have oriented their strategies toward global political narratives—climate change, identity politics, ESG branding—seeking alignment with international advocacy groups and non-state actors. While this may strengthen relationships with certain constituencies, it often fails to reflect the priorities of local communities, which focus on employment, income, infrastructure, and economic opportunity.
The result is a strategic disconnect: companies optimize for global legitimacy while losing traction with the stakeholders most directly affected by mining operations.
By privileging a limited set of global narratives, companies adopt a reduced and partial understanding of stakeholder expectations. Sustainable development is multidimensional—economic, social, institutional, environmental—and local actors interpret these dimensions differently from international NGOs or political elites. This reductionist approach increases conflict risk, erodes trust, and limits the perceived value generated by mining.
The misalignment between corporate strategies and local socioeconomic realities translates into:
In regions with structural poverty, these risks are amplified and can threaten long-term operational viability.
The concentration of extractive activity in high-poverty territories is not a temporary phenomenon—it is a structural feature of the global resource map. This requires mining companies to adopt strategies that go beyond environmental compliance or global ESG narratives and instead directly address the economic transformation of the territories where they operate. Without this shift, the sector will continue to face a legitimacy deficit and an increasingly fragile operating environment.
RiskDemand for energy-transition minerals is set to surge. Whether that becomes a development window or another lost decade depends on political stability, not commodity prices.
Read analysis →Close ↑Global demand for minerals essential to the energy transition—copper, nickel, cobalt, manganese, and related inputs—is expected to accelerate sharply over the coming years. This surge represents a historic opportunity for countries that hold a significant share of global production and for mining companies positioned within these supply chains. The opportunity is particularly strong for firms with deep commercial and political linkages to China, which today accounts for 39% to 63% of primary consumption of these minerals (USGS).
However, a country's ability to convert this mineral boom into long-term development and broad-based prosperity will depend on far more than favourable market conditions. The decisive variables will be political stability, regulatory predictability, and the capacity to manage socioeconomic and environmental conflict. Without these foundations, even the most favourable commodity cycle will fail to translate into sustained national gains.
Over the past several years, we have observed a deterioration in these fundamentals across multiple jurisdictions. The resurgence of radical ideological narratives, persistent regulatory uncertainty (notably in Chile and Peru), episodes of violent social conflict (again in Chile and Peru), and chronic weak governance and transparency deficits (D.R. Congo, Indonesia, Philippines) have eroded investor confidence and undermined the sector's development potential. At the same time, ineffective public policies have failed to improve socioeconomic conditions in mining regions across countries such as Chile, Peru, Indonesia, the Philippines, South Africa, and Gabon.
This dynamic creates a self-reinforcing vicious cycle: instability fuels conflict; conflict increases operational and political risk; and rising risk generates powerful incentives for companies to minimize exposure—through tax avoidance strategies, aggressive cost-cutting, reduced social investment, lower performance standards, and accelerated capital recovery. These behaviours, while rational from a firm-level risk perspective, further weaken the development impact of mining and deepen local grievances.
The world is entering a period of unprecedented mineral demand. Whether this becomes a transformational development window or yet another missed opportunity will depend on the ability of resource-rich countries to break this cycle of instability, rebuild institutional credibility, and align mining governance with long-term national objectives.
EconomyA counterfactual exercise on what the absence of the mining sector would mean for the Australian economy — employment, exports, and fiscal revenue.
Read analysis →Close ↑A few weeks ago, the Queensland State Government announced one of the highest coal royalty tax regimes in the world. Although the immediate financial burden falls on mining companies, the broader economic impact will be transmitted across the entire ecosystem: suppliers, contractors, employees, regional economies, and ultimately the State's own fiscal base. Reduced investment and lower future growth inevitably translate into lower long-term fiscal revenues, weaker regional development, and diminished economic resilience.
Australia's prosperity is deeply intertwined with the mining sector. Direct mining activity contributes 10%–12% of national GDP, while the indirect and induced effects—through taxes, macroeconomic stability, procurement, employment, technology transfer, research, and international competitiveness—add another 8%–10%. Mining is not simply a sector; it is a pillar of Australia's economic architecture.
This raises a fundamental question: What would Australia look like without mining?
Over the past two decades, Australia's GDP per capita has consistently outperformed its OECD peers. Between 2000 and 2021, Australia maintained a strong upward trajectory, reaching US$61,000 per capita in 2021, compared to the OECD average of US$51,000. This performance reflects not only macroeconomic stability but also the structural role of mining in sustaining national income, export capacity, and investment cycles.
Our analysis indicates that WITHOUT MINING, Australia's GDP per capita would fall below the OECD average, landing between US$46,000 and US$48,000. While still relatively high, this represents a 20%–25% reduction in national income—equivalent to erasing decades of economic gains and weakening Australia's position among advanced economies.
GDP per capita is only one indicator, but the implications extend far beyond it. A mining-less Australia would face:
In short, the mining sector is not merely a contributor to GDP—it is a structural driver of Australia's long-term prosperity, regional development, and global economic standing. Any policy that weakens the sector must be evaluated not only through short-term fiscal gains but through its system-wide economic consequences.
InstitutionsWhy it matters to analyse the role played by modern institutions and culture in advancing human rights globally.
Read analysis →Close ↑The analysis of the role of modern institutions and culture in advancing Human Rights (HR) is essential to understand the conditions that enable or hinder their effective realization. From the New Institutionalism (NI) approach, institutions are understood as central actors shaping political behaviour, as they structure norms, values, identities, and culture. In this framework, culture is conceived as a set of shared norms, meanings, and ideas.
However, although institutional strengthening is an important mechanism to reduce the gap between international human rights treaties and their effective implementation, this has not been sufficient. Institutions are not neutral structures; by reproducing norms and hierarchies, they also reproduce social inequalities (Krook & Mackay, 2010, pp. 3–4, 6–7, 11–12). Consequently, strengthening institutions is not enough, as a critical analysis of the power relations that shape them is also required.
Likewise, culture in its various approaches plays a central role in debates on HR progress. For NI, culture corresponds to shared norms, meanings, and ideas. Also, culture is a constitutive dimension operating within institutions and a mechanism for reproducing power (Krook & Mackay, 2010, pp. 6–7, 7–8, 11). However, it can also be understood as a local normative framework, and here a key analytical tension emerges: when cultural logic prevails over institutional logic, it can generate obstacles or delays in consolidating HR progress (Subedi, Nanau, & Magar, 2021, pp. 529–532).
Similarly, institutional change or advances in HR are often driven by international pressures. However, this process requires critical evaluation, as it can also constitute a form of external power. Under the guise of modern institutions, interventionist practices may be reproduced that do not necessarily lead to substantive HR improvements in local contexts.
Therefore, advancing in the field of HR requires clarifying the roles and limits of NI and culture, especially in contexts where culture is part of the local normative framework and simultaneously a key NI actor. It is also essential to strengthen transparency and accountability to prevent institutions from becoming spaces of political power or vehicles imposing external agendas.
Krook, M. L., & Mackay, F. (2010). Gender, Politics and Institutions: Towards a Feminist Institutionalism (1st ed.). London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.
Subedi, D. B., Nanau, G., & Magar, D. (2021). From a 'cultural logic' to an 'institutional logic': The politics of human rights in Pacific Island Countries. Journal of Human Rights, 20(5), 528–546. doi:10.1080/14754835.2021.1947207
SocialA critical examination of digital movements and their real capacity to generate lasting social and political change.
Read analysis →Close ↑There is an implicit premise in debates about digital politics: greater visibility on social networks necessarily equates to a greater capacity for mobilization. However, from the discussion in the seminar and the analysis of Margetts et al. (Margetts, Hale, & John, 2015), it is possible to point out that online collective action, despite having the same logic as classic collective action, fails quickly and only a few manage to consolidate.
While digital platforms transform the conditions of participation by making it faster, more visible and less dependent, individuals continue to evaluate costs and benefits before participating. But on the other hand, this ease can make collective action more unstable: the collective energy can be more readily available, but at the same time could more often be on the verge of evaporating, leading us to a system with an oversaturation of stimuli.
Thus, the reduction of communication and participation barriers not only expands the possibilities of political coordination but also increases the information noise that surrounds collective action. Connective action is especially relevant at this point, as it explains that a large part of digital participation adopts personalized, symbolic and decentralized forms, sustained by acts of personal expression and sharing, rather than by stable organizational commitment. Consequently, the digital presence of a movement cannot automatically be assumed as evidence of social roots. So, this phenomenon is not accidental, but a result of the structure of the digital environment.
From this perspective, one central problem of digital politics is the difficulty in distinguishing between genuine support, algorithmic amplification and strategic manipulation. Echo chambers, the selective visibility of platforms and the various forms of information disorder, including misinformation, disinformation and mal-information (Claire Wardle, 2017) complicate the interpretation of the vox populi.
Furthermore, in a context with AI tools, the digital ecosystem becomes even more volatile. So, digital politics is not only a space for expanded mobilization, but an environment where the informational conditions of genuinely democratic collective action can be seriously affected.
Claire Wardle, H. D. (2017). Information disorder: Toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policy making.
Margetts, H., Hale, S., & John, P. (2015). Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
PoliticsAn analysis of how charismatic-plebiscitary leadership challenges traditional democratic institutions and redefines the relationship between leaders and citizens.
Read analysis →Close ↑Why is it relevant for democracies of the 21st century to be able to detect, in time, the presence of charismatic-plebiscitary leaders (CPL)?
Before answering this question, it is necessary to refer to the main characteristics that define a CPL.
First, charisma is defined as an extraordinary quality, which does not depend on whether the leader actually possesses exceptional abilities, but rather on how followers "see things" and whether they believe them (Subedi & Scott, 2021, p. 489).
The CPL has a revolutionary character, a disruptive narrative, and at the same time a hopeful message in times of crisis. They use crises to their advantage by attributing to themselves the will of their followers, the voice of the People. Thus, charisma is a direct social relationship between the leader and followers; therefore, it is not mediated by institutions (Subedi & Scott, 2021, p. 493).
Thus, one of the greatest sources of power of a CPL is the affective devotion of followers, through which a CPL shapes collective psychology before institutions react. Under this premise, the CPL captures the public narrative, making information manipulation practically irreversible. That is, they do not need to completely control institutions to exercise power; and by exercising this power without brakes, authoritarianism begins to become institutionalized.
Under the above premises, the charisma of a CPL is "not an inherent personal quality" but is instead the result of a "politically constructed" process (Subedi & Scott, 2021, p. 488). Today, democracies, from conservatives to liberals, are adopting regimes of plebiscitary leader democracy (PLD) and evolving into hybrid regimes that mix democratic and authoritarian traits.
Based on the above, a direct answer to the initial question is:
It is important to detect the presence of a CPL or PLD, since this has a direct implication for democracies. In practice, PLDs can become de facto authoritarian regimes, a clear warning sign that places 21st-century democracies at risk. It is therefore essential to create additional democratic protection systems, since the traditional mechanisms may no longer be sufficient.
Subedi, D. B., & Scott, A. (2021). Populism, authoritarianism, and charismatic-plebiscitary leadership in contemporary Asia: a comparative perspective from India and Myanmar. Contemporary Politics, 27(5), 487–507. doi:10.1080/13569775.2021.1917162
Three charts and frameworks from our data desk — on how global shocks move commodity prices, fiscal dependence across Sub-Saharan Africa, and the macroeconomic pathways to development in extractive economies.
Copper's performance during major global disruptions shows why it is one of the most reliable real-time economic indicators: monetary shocks, geopolitical ruptures, and financial crises rapidly affect copper-intensive sectors such as construction, manufacturing, transport, and grid expansion, causing prices to fall sharply in downturns and rebound quickly during recoveries.
Extractive GDP analysis provides a critical point for understanding the structural challenges governments face when designing and implementing public policies in resource-rich economies. The wide dispersion between absolute extractive output and the sector's share of national GDP reveals fundamentally different macro-fiscal realities: countries such as Nigeria and South Africa generate large extractive GDP in absolute terms, yet their broader economic bases dilute sectoral dependence, while others — most notably the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon — exhibit extreme concentration, with extractives accounting for more than 30–60% of total GDP. This asymmetry shapes everything from fiscal vulnerability and revenue volatility to the political economy of reform, institutional capacity requirements, and the feasibility of diversification strategies. As such, these values are not merely descriptive — they frame the policy space, constraints, and sequencing required for effective governance in the region.
Analytical Framework
Extractive economies do not fail from a lack of wealth, but from the absence of effective transmission mechanisms between resources and development. This framework identifies three causal stages: the initial conditions — both domestic and external — that define the policy space; the transmission mechanisms — monetary, fiscal, regulatory, and geopolitical — that either amplify or distort resource flows; and the development outcomes that, depending on the quality of governance, may be positive or negative. For decision-makers, the question is not whether resources exist, but how well this transmission mechanism actually works.
