The transition to clean energy, digital infrastructure, militarisation in defence and artificial intelligence all depend on minerals whose extraction is disproportionately concentrated in resource-rich developing economies. As innovation accelerates in these sectors, so does pressure to expand extraction, with significant environmental and social consequences.
Much of the sustainability debate has therefore focused on an urgent question: how can the growing demand for minerals be met more sustainably – economically, socially and environmentally? The responses are: add value locally, reduce demand, recycle, substitute materials. Strengthen environmental and social standards. Improve community participation. Develop due diligence and traceability systems.
While these are all important responses, they pay much less attention to the role and possibilities of self-governance for mineral-rich economies: deciding how and where extraction takes place, how its environmental and social costs are managed, how value is captured, and whether mineral development builds productive and technological capabilities.
A new architecture for securing minerals
This omission of self-governance matters because, largely outside sustainability debates, a different transformation is taking place that is narrowing precisely some of these possibilities. Powerful consuming countries are building an increasingly sophisticated architecture for securing access to critical minerals. Trade and investment rules, strategic partnerships, public finance, offtake agreements, provisions governing technology transfer, standards and diplomatic and security agreements are being combined to secure the minerals required for economic, technological and strategic priorities of powerful economies.
These instruments are affecting producer governments’ ability to implement policies aimed precisely at ensuring the economic, social and environmental sustainability of mineral development.
Instruments to secure minerals
Trade rules are one example. Indonesia banned exports of unprocessed nickel ore as part of a strategy to develop domestic processing and manufacturing. The European Union challenged the measure at the World Trade Organization. In 2022, a WTO panel found both the export ban and Indonesia’s domestic processing requirement inconsistent with its GATT obligations (require countries to treat foreign goods equally to domestic ones. Indonesia appealed, leaving the dispute unresolved because the WTO Appellate Body remains non-operational.
More recent agreements are incorporating similar constraints. The US-Malaysia Agreement on Reciprocal Trade restricts Malaysia’s ability to impose export restrictions on critical minerals, unlike Indonesia’s domestic processing.
Rules governing technological learning provide another example. The EU-Indonesia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA), framed in part as a means of diversifying Indonesia’s trade relationships away from China, restricts requirements for local content and technology transfer. These local capabilities have enabled mechanisms through which governments have sought to turn foreign investment and local processing into domestic productive and technological capabilities.
Finance is also part of this architecture. In 2025, the Japan Bank for International Cooperation and a private financial institution agreed to provide US$666 million to Chile’s state-owned Codelco, explicitly to ensure stable imports of copper concentrates for Japanese manufacturers.
Development assistance can enter these negotiations too. In 2026, US lawmakers raised concerns that the State Department had threatened to withhold HIV medicines and other assistance to pressure Zambia into signing a critical-minerals agreement. Meanwhile, the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) is deploying loans, equity and political-risk insurance to support critical-mineral investments abroad, explicitly connecting them to US strategic objectives and mineral access.
Investor–state dispute settlement
But the most paradigmatic example is investor–state dispute settlement (ISDS). Investment treaties allow foreign investors to bring claims directly against governments when they consider that public policies or regulatory changes have violated protections granted to their investments.The amounts involved can be substantial. According to UNCTAD, the average amount claimed in known ISDS cases is US$1.1 billion, while the average award in cases decided in favour of investors is US$385 million.
Developing countries have faced the majority of these disputes. In Latin America and the Caribbean, 419 known investor–state claims had been brought by October 2025, with governments ordered to pay US$36.6 billion to foreign investors. Mining, oil and gas accounted for almost a quarter of these claims.
Colombia’s Santurbán páramo illustrates some of the tensions particularly clearly. After Colombia strengthened restrictions on mining (aligned with international agreements), Canadian mining company Eco Oro challenged the measures affecting its concession under the Canada–Colombia Free Trade Agreement, seeking more than US$1 billion in compensation. The tribunal found Colombia in breach of one treaty obligation but ultimately awarded no damages. The contradiction is clear: on the one hand, the country is oblied to introduce stricter regulations and norms by certain frameworks and agreement, but is penalised if it does it but others designed to protect foreign investment.
With claims of this magnitude, the possibility of lengthy litigation and large compensation awards can itself affect governments’ willingness to introduce or strengthen regulation – a phenomenon known as regulatory chill.
Mission impossible
And here lies the contradiction that sustainability debates are largely missing. While focusing on how to reduce the need for new extraction, a seemingly “impossible mission” as mineral demand continues to grow, or make extraction more environmentally and socially responsible, they are missing the geopolitics that is increasingly restricting producer countries’ ability to manage their resources for sustainability and development.
The de(geo)politicisation of sustainability
This is what I think of as the de(geo)politicisation of sustainability: problems rooted partly in unequal relationships between countries are increasingly reframed as problems of firms, communities and local environmental governance.
This is particularly visible in the way we think about extractivism. A concept historically concerned with unequal economic relationships and patterns of development is increasingly located primarily in mining territories: in conflicts between companies, communities and ecosystems, to be addressed through certification, participation, due diligence and traceability. These interventions matter enormously. But when the problem is located mainly at the site of extraction, the international rules, institutions and power relations that shape what producer countries can do with their resources disappear from view.
And with it, what also disappears is producer countries themselves as development actors: governments making choices about industrialisation, firms building technological capabilities, universities generating knowledge, and societies debating not only how extraction should occur but what development it should make possible.
Putting these actors and relationships back into the picture requires bringing global political economy, and insights from dependency theory, back into sustainability debates. Not out of nostalgia, but because without them we risk treating extraction primarily as an environmental problem to be managed rather than a political economy to be transformed.
