Governing Critical Minerals and the New Doctrine of Economic Security

As demands for critical minerals increase in response to the energy transition, the international context marked by strategic competition has also changed. Specifically, US-China rivalry has posited the possibility of creating two supply chains, centred around these two economies and linking suppliers of critical minerals and advanced manufacturing. To explain how environment and security concerns have coalesced in the sector, the paper examines the new doctrine of economic security that has emerged among industrialized countries. Our paper takes a bird’s eye view in energy transition debates. We demonstrate the emerging logic of economic security as increasingly mainstream in the nexus of energy-environmental policy discourse and practices. Specifically, we argue that energy transition and environmental governance have moved away from the logic of globalization that underpins a strong role for international institutions for cooperation on climate change and energy transformation. Instead, states have redrawn the map of alliance formation, focusing on a range of national policy choices in favour of industrial policy. Drawing from the most relevant policy documents in the US, EU and China, we detail the discursive shift away from interdependence and cooperation that underpinned the neoliberal institutional framework in inter-state relations toward supply chain resilience and efficacy of industrial policy. This, in turn, marks not only the current subsidies war in high tech sector among industrialized countries, but it also underpins growing securitization of energy transition. To support our argument, we draw from two methodological techniques: firstly, we conducted policy content analysis by coding major policy documents and presidential addresses in the US, EU, and China; we then supplement this with elite interviews through the ERC-funded GRIP-ARM project. Given the increasingly sensitive nature of studying supply chains and geopolitics of energy transition, we combine one-to-one elite interviews with ‘industrial ethnography’ as a triangulation technique in data collection.