Raw Material Justice in Supply Chains as a Condition of Legitimate Decarbonization: A Kantian Account

Climate change makes the rapid decarbonization of energy systems imperative, but solving climate change poses far-reaching challenges for humanity. The energy transition, the switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, relies heavily on raw materials to produce energy storage technologies. Significant problems are thus shifted from the life cycle phase of use to the extraction phase. Central concerns of 'the dark side of the energy transition' are the human rights violations caused by the mining of critical raw materials, such as the cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which are characterised by child and forced labour, but also lithium mining in the Salar de Atacama in Chile, and their water conflicts with indigenous and local populations. Both cobalt and lithium are used in battery technologies and are used extensively in countries of the Global North. While existing debates on sustainable development, energy justice, and responsible sourcing have extensively addressed these challenges, they predominantly focus on distributive outcomes. By contrast, the more fundamental question of under which legal and normative conditions decarbonization itself can be regarded as just and rightful remains insufficiently explored. This article develops a Kantian account of Raw Material Justice as a criterion of legitimate decarbonization. Its purpose is not to derive contemporary supply-chain regulation directly from Kant. Rather, it reconstructs and extends the systematic logic of Kant’s Doctrine of Right to transnational relations of extraction and procurement. The Universal Principle of Right requires that the external freedom of each coexist with the freedom of all under universal law. Applied institutionally, this principle directs attention beyond the conduct of individual firms towards the public conditions under which claims to land, resources, labour, and contract can be reciprocally determined and enforced. Compliance with existing positive law is therefore insufficient where fragmented or deficient legal orders leave some actors subject to the unilateral choices of others. On this basis, Raw Material Justice is defined as the condition in which the institutions governing raw-material extraction, processing, trade, and procurement secure relations of equal external freedom among those subject to them. The article reconstructs three requirements of such a condition: first, recognition of persons as free and equal legal subjects, excluding forced labour, violence, and arbitrary coercion; second, reciprocal determination of external claims concerning land, water, property, labour, and resources; and third, public institutions providing representation, accountability, enforcement, and effective remedies. These are justificatory requirements rather than a catalogue of policy instruments. Climate harm and extractive injustice both threaten conditions of external freedom. The relevant question is therefore which institutional and technological strategies can address climate change without unilaterally imposing the burdens of decarbonization on vulnerable persons and communities. Raw Material Justice is consequently a necessary condition of legitimate decarbonization and a standard for comparing more and less material-intensive transition strategies.