Circular Economy Politics: The Comparative Political Economy of Critical Raw Materials Circularity

Climate change urgently requires transitioning from carbon-based to sustainable sources of energy. The energy transition, however, is driving up the demand for a host of "critical raw materials" (CRMs, i.e., non-energy raw materials such as Aluminum, Lithium, Silicon, and "rare earth" metals, needed for wind turbines, solar panels, energy storage, etc., for which there are few currently known substitutes). Their extraction, moreover, causes negative environmental and health externalities – and for many CRMs is possible only from a few source countries, many of which are politically unstable and increasingly willing to use their choke point positions in the global supply chain for political leverage. Circular recovery and re-use of CRMs promises to provide an alternative source of CRMs without the political risks and negative environmental externalities. However, even the advanced industrial democracies differ greatly in the extent to which they have put in place circular economy-incentivising policies – and how those policies operate. We present a new dataset that maps the variation in such policies across Europe and the world -- and we examine possible drivers of the cross-national differences.