Green Industrial Policy Digging Deeper: Conversations on Mining and Just Transitions

Katie: Thank you all for joining! Thea, could I start by asking if you could tell us what is meant by green industrial policy?

Thea: That is a big question. It’s probably better to start with what industrial policy means, because ‘green’ is a new addition to an older concept. In the Global South, especially Latin America, it is sometimes framed as ‘developmentalism’. Industrial policy or developmentalist policies attempt to achieve a structural transformation of the economy, with an objective in mind. That objective can be growth, moving up the value chain, or social or economic development. In the case of ‘green’, the objective is something about greening the economy, through decarbonization, or through other goals like reducing the material or ecological footprint of economic processes. So green industrial policies are when the state intervenes in economic processes with a ‘green’ direction or developmental goal.

And this prompts some questions. One question pertains to the relationship between the state and the economy or the state and capitalism. We are talking about public policies that reshape the economy by stimulating new economic sectors; or construct and coordinate new supply chains; or insert the economy in a different way in the global system. In the definition of industrial policy, the economy is not fundamentally separate from the political sphere. We don’t have free markets over here and politics over there, right? It’s clear that under capitalism, the state plays a pivotal role in the process of accumulation and social reproduction, but that role is more visible when state actors are reshaping the economy according to certain goals.  

Another question is: which states are we talking about? States do not approach their domestic economies or the international economy on equal footing. The world system is forged and continues to be shaped by colonial and neo-colonial relations, where mechanisms of trade and the financial architecture tend to, with few exceptions, reproduce an inequality that dates to five or six hundred years ago. It was not dramatically transformed by decolonization or Global South efforts to change their position in the global economy. There are important exceptions, such as China, Brazil or Indonesia. It’s not that Global South governments can’t change their positions or their domestic economies, but the game is rigged against them.

When the US government implements industrial policy, it does so from a different position in terms of fiscal, monetary and policy space than governments in the Global South. Even so shaping the activities of capitalist investors is tricky. It’s even trickier in a state with less geo-economic weight, occupying a lower position in the value chain, and with more extractive, low-wage manufacturing.

What does it mean for industrial policy to be green? It’s still an open question. Does it mean trying to incentivise an energy transition? Trying to decarbonise the most carbon-intensive sectors? Does it mean opening up entirely new sectors? Where does the natural environment and biodiversity fit in? We often think only about the energy transition and not the broader ecological framework in which economies are embedded. So there are many questions about what counts as green, but also pitfalls and risks around green-washing and false solutions. We should also interrogate the power and capacities of states in implementing these industrial policies.

Katie: Thanks so much Thea. As Thea alluded to, some countries in the Global South are hoping to use the rush in ‘transition’ minerals to ’move up the supply chain’ or renegotiate their place in the global economy. Kennedy, could you tell us about resource nationalization, state-led development, and your research in Zimbabwe. What needs to happen differently in a new wave of green industrial policy?

Kennedy: This is an important question in Africa at the moment, because the current discourse is all about African agency. To what extent are we sovereign states and independent from our former colonizers, the Europeans? To what extent do we, as Africans, control, own and manage the means and factors of production; food distribution; extraction; consumption; export; finance; value addition and beneficiation [processing of ore]?

This is a question since colonialism and the liberation movement. When the abolition movement was fighting for independence, it was the land question: where our minerals are. So the question ‘resource nationalism’ gained attention. Countries that became independent - Nigeria, the North African countries, South Africa - tried to implement policies in different ways, with different outcomes.

My PhD research in Zimbabwe looked at the implementation of the ‘Indigenization and Economic Empowerment Programme’. The goal of that programme was to transfer a minimum of 51% from foreign-owned companies to indigenous or local citizens or local governments. There were a lot of definition issues around who is indigenous and who is not. It was especially relevant in extractive industries, because Zimbabwe is shifting from an agri-based economy to an extractive-based economy. I analysed the change in percent of ownership. The implementation met a lot of setbacks, including, obviously, massive capital flight to neighbouring South Africa: many companies fled the country, or scaled down. This was implemented between 2010 and 2017, under President Mugabe. After that, we returned to a neoliberal market-based approach, where anyone in the world could come to Zimbabwe and claim 100% ownership of the means of production in mining. It took a huge toll on the development of the economy.

Regarding green industrial policy, Zimbabwe has the fifth or sixth biggest lithium deposits in the world, number one in Africa. We have about 5 big lithium companies, all of them with huge Chinese ownership and control: some 100%, some 85%. In 2022, the government imposed an export ban on raw lithium to encourage value-addition, guarantee processing of lithium in the country, and defend its jobs. Companies were forced to establish processing plants on site.

The extraction of cobalt, lithium and other critical minerals constitute 0.6% of the total value chain. If you add smelting, I think it goes to 1.6%. This means that source countries don’t benefit from mining. That is why Zimbabwe followed Indonesia, which banned the export of raw nickel. Zimbabwe followed suit, and then Namibia. We now have Ghana, Chile, and they are talking about it in Bolivia. An ideology of resource nationalism and value addition is spreading in the ‘critical raw materials’ producing countries.

How can we benefit from the decarbonization of the economy and the energy transition? In Africa, the narrative is: we first need to recentre African agency. South Africa is experimenting with ‘Just Energy Transition Partnerships’. At COP26, a partnership was established, and South Africa was promised 8 to 11 billion USD by international donor partners: EU, Germany, US and other countries. Now, South Africa has to do its own investigation: how much do we really need for a smooth, just, inclusive and sustainable energy transition?

The government released The Just Energy Transition Implementation Plan last year and it was shocking: for a sustainable, just, inclusive energy transition, the country needs 95 billion USD. But where are you getting that money from? South Africa has huge coal deposits. If current production continues as is, South Africa would need more than 200 years to deplete its coal. The narrative is about decarbonizing the world and the economy, dumping coal. But where are we going to get the money? So, there are many contradictions in Africa. We have liquefied natural gas, oil, coal, and are told ‘don’t do it’. The way the ‘just energy transition partnership’ is framed – it is not an African concept! So why are we supposed to download a blueprint from the global world, implement it the way they craft it, without asking questions? We need to scrutinize it.

Katie: Thank you so much. The question of financing and what visions of Just Transition genuinely come from the Global South, versus visions imposed by Europe, North America and centres of historical imperial power, is a very important one.  

Lala, could you tell us about your work with TUED and how a more democratic and publicly owned transition might help to address some of these tensions?

Lala: In TUED, we use the term ‘public pathway,’ understanding that a pathway to a just energy transition will look different in different contexts. Indonesia, for example, is highly dependent on coal for export. Colombia also historically depended on coal, but their electricity generation today is about 70% decarbonized, with a more diversified grid with more possibilities for decarbonization.

A public pathway has different elements to it. The first is to fulfil the right to energy: to restore the mandate, obligation, and capacity of public agencies to eradicate energy poverty. A second step is to identify and reverse neoliberal laws in the power sector, or in this case, mining. Colombia’s Petro administration is in the process of reverting the 2001 Mining Law, which served mining resources on a gold platter to private multinational companies and gave them extremely favourable conditions at the cost of social and environmental impacts. There are ongoing discussions, and it has been a very participatory process. It is not perfect, but there is a lot to learn from the process, which is led by the Ministry of Mining and Energy in Colombia, with the support and pressure of social movements and workers’ movements from below. They had a summit of about 1500 people in Bogota earlier this year to draft this new mining law with the participation of representatives from small miners’ associations and collectives, community councils and energy associations tied to housing rights organisations. It was a very diverse arena, and this draft is now making its way very slowly through debates in Congress.

A third step to a public pathway is to enforce this pro-public mandate. In Latin America, this includes developing these political visions with indigenous peoples. In Colombia black communities and farmer communities are incredibly important and powerful, and shaped the current Constitution. We need to address what it means in a more critical sense to obtain ‘free prior and informed consent’ (FPIC) in line with a vision of justice. That’s an important part of enforcing this pro-public mandate. The proposal for Ecominerales is doing that. This proposal from the National Mining Agency of Colombia has so far only passed the first round of debates in Congress, but it is really interesting.

A public pathway also has to have a public planned approach to the energy transition. In Latin America we see headlines about a 500% increase in demand for this or that resource, and it’s totally manic. The way this is being reported is infiltrating discussions in Congress. Mining ministers, such as Peru’s, saying: ‘our main duty to the country is’ – and this is totally insane – ‘to unblock the current community resistance through whatever means necessary’.

Latin American countries and communities need to resist that pressure. We don’t know what is going to happen in 10, 20, 30 years. These projections often don’t play out. To have a planned approach to our mining, we need to have a diversified production of technologies; work inter-regionally; and have public-public partnerships. We have to mandate ambitious economy-wide energy conservation targets and implement our own priorities in terms of employment, environmental protections and public research programs. How do we want to use our resources and for what end?

Ecominerales, that I mentioned a minute ago, was presented as a state-owned company for mining in Colombia, as the Ecopetrol of mining – Ecopetrol being our 80% state-owned oil company. There was a famous line by Álvaro Pardo, the director of the National Mining Agency, saying that the most important mining wealth of Colombia is not coal, but the lives of miners and communities that depend on these minerals and asking  what policies will be required to restore regulation of the sector and reclaim it from armed, illegal and paramilitary actors, that have led the mining sector to be extremely violent in Colombia. A big part of the company’s financing is also intended to activate the return of assets from the termination of mining titles: a lot of multinational companies are leaving the country because they project better profits somewhere else, and they are abandoning mines in horrible conditions. The state is trying to receive these assets, close some responsibly, but maybe re-activate some. That is one of the contradictions of this transition: mining companies leave a mess behind, and the state has to pick up the pieces.

Katie: Thea, drawing on your work at the Climate and Community Institute, how can we negotiate the demands of the energy transition and the rights of grassroots and frontline communities on the Right to Say No? How can these movements work together?

Thea: First of all, it can’t be overstated how environmentally impactful mining is. It is what some scientists call an irreversible dramatic change in land use, with implications for ecosystems, watersheds and waterways that are routed through that land. For land-based and land-dependent communities - Indigenous, peasant and other communities rely on land for their livelihood and cultural practices - mining is devastating.

Mining is also an insecure base for national economies and development because it is linked to global commodity markets that are very volatile and susceptible to dramatic price swings. Mining is unreliable from a national political economy perspective, especially in the Global South, where governments rely on it for their fiscal base. That is why Global South countries are trying to ‘downstream’, moving away from only extraction, down the supply chain, or ‘up the value chain’ (different spatial metaphors meaning the exact same thing).

It is also clear that mining is one of the most violent sectors for land and water defenders in the world. It beats agriculture, forestry, and other sectors with atrocious human rights records. So when we talk about expanding mining without governance reform, we are talking about expanding death. People die because of mining-related conflicts. Two hundred environmental and land defenders were killed last year, and that’s probably a significant undercount. That is why communities say no.

We have this unhelpful concept in the US called NIMBYism, ‘not in my back yard’: that communities reject new things as some kind of attitude problem. But mining transforms landscapes and may eliminate existing livelihoods. If communities protest, they are met with violence, by private security guards or state violence. Even for communities far from mining sites, it is not a reliable route to economic development. So that is why we see resistance and conflict over mining.

How do we deal with the fact that some new mining is needed for the energy transition? I say ‘some level’ advisedly. Because I agree 100% with Lala, that some forecasts foresee a bombastic level of mining, and we should question those models and assumptions: What supply chains are they feeding into? Who are the beneficiaries of the products these minerals are inputs for?

It’s complicated when the end-use is the energy transition. I have deeply questioned ‘how much mining?’ in my own work. But, in the near-term, some mining is needed. In the medium to long-term, circular economy can have a significant role, but we can’t have a circular economy before we have the recycled feedstock available, and we are not at that level yet.

The need for some mining is compatible with the Right to Say No and even with Degrowth. We are transitioning to a new material infrastructure of the energy transition, meaning stuff needs to be made. But how much stuff? For whom? Sited where? With what division of profits and revenues? With what level of community input? Those are political and social questions and the result of collective choices that we either make, as ordinary people and movements, or elites will make for us.

So how do we make as complementary as possible the rights of communities to determine their own livelihoods and territorial planning of their landscapes, at every scale? These are local, national and regional processes. How do we face the question of territorial forms of self-determination regarding whether mining happens or not? That’s a question of democratic sovereignty. How do we combine this with the fact that even for a just, really decolonial, internationalist, eco-socialist energy transition we need some minerals?

Usually we focus on better mining governance in places where mining happens: Chile, Peru, Colombia. But those governments and communities are not solely responsible for creating better supply chains if there aren’t changes in the Global North. Rather than asking governments of peripheral states to govern the mining rush better, what if we have a less resource-intensive energy transition in the Global North and other places where the minerals go? We need a combined strategy to move away from resource-intensive energy systems and transportation systems, from individual electric vehicles to electrified mass transit, for example. A public pathway approach, as Lala mentioned, can be applied to the built environment, technologies and infrastructures of the energy transition. The research that my colleagues and I have conducted shows that mass public transport, compared to individual cars, requires a lot less minerals and alleviates pressure on the Global South.

Another question is: how can we keep resources within the Global South to develop sovereign economies there, including regionally integrated economies? How can resources stay there and enter supply chains to fulfil social needs?

The Right to Say No - which is a right of democratic sovereignty – will not be perfectly compatible with the energy transition, but some compatibility is possible. There will be tensions: trade-offs with real material basis. Even in a just society, choices have to be made through democratic deliberation and contestation about where to place mine or site a grid. But we need a different model of consumption and production, a more ecologically and socially rational regime of extraction, because the less mining there is, the fewer communities will be subjected to its harms, and the more space there is for communities to organize for more sustainable economies and livelihoods. There have been incremental steps towards policies that move away from individual electric vehicles, towards mass transit. Some cities have much lower car usage. There are places making these strides. But communities and the climate and energy transition goals are put into such extreme conflict because of how resource intensive the transition is.

Katie: Thank you so much Thea. You brilliantly tied together these issues. Lala, where do you see political processes to negotiate and mediate the decision-making Thea is talking about? What does a citizen-led, grassroots, bottom-up vision of a just transition look like?

Lala: Under a market-oriented energy transition, we in the labour movement have been conditioned to prioritise ‘social dialogue’ as the ultimate process to resolve conflicts. A public pathway prioritizes a public power approach to resolving these conflicts and building the political processes we need. This means having community councils, workers councils and relevant government bodies involved in the decision-making around mining policy. In the policy spaces that we’ve had in TUED-South, we’ve identified that trade unions and social movements have a long way to go in putting their demands on paper, in a way that can be taken to the streets and halls of Congress to pressure for specific visions. It’s one of the strategic areas that people interested in these movements, including researchers and research centres, can help to support.

In Chile, for example, the labour movement is highly fragmented. But lithium miners are trying to create a ‘lithium mine workers federation’ that puts together all the different unions that could apply pressure to the lithium companies (both public and multinational). It’s been a very frustrated process because of corporate interests that push back and try to co-opt these processes. It’s led to unsatisfactory results so far, and these processes of creating worker and community cohesion to push forward demands requires international solidarity.

Colombia is a more optimistic case study because of the progressive government at the moment, but it could revert to the right-wing in two years. I hope not. But what decision-making infrastructure can we leave in place that can allow us to continue building more just mining if the government changes? Not just laws, but the actual power-building and coalition-building that is often weakened when we have progressive governments in power because of co-optation.

In TUED-South we recently launched a network of research centres working with trade unions, like INEP of Brazil, CIPAME of Colombia, Fundación Meridiano of Argentina. They are pushing forward what a public pathway could look like in their unions and sectors; identifying common issues across Latin America that could help inform the direction of a public pathway; and coordinating regionally. There is a lot of work to do - that is very motivating, but the road is long.

Katie: Kennedy, on the question of internationalism and how formerly colonized countries can achieve a just energy transition: Could you tell us a bit about the discussion on reparations?

Kennedy: On ecological reparations, the metabolic rift happened since colonialism, under Europeans for the past 500 years. One kind of atonement Africans are demanding is climate change reparations, including loss and damage funds under the UN framework convention on climate change (UNFCC). Europe and North America industrialized at the expense of us Africans. We are experiencing the impacts of climate change, as a result of Global North industrialisation, even while resources are being taken from Africa. So, Africans are demanding the fulfilment of a moral obligation by paying reparations. Debt cancelation can be one form.  We also need the Global North to make sure that the ‘Loss and Damage Fund’ that they promised is delivered.  But many donor countries are not honouring their pledges for climate finance. That is why the impact of climate change in Africa is so huge: we are vulnerable, without mitigation and adaptation measures. In 2019, we had a massive cyclone, Cyclone Idai, which hugely impacted Mozambique, Malawi, Zimbabwe, and parts of South Africa. Whole communities were swept away and the impacts are still being felt.

On the just energy transition, Africans are talking about energy needs. Firstly, we should transition to clean energy at our pace. What is the contribution of the whole African continent it terms of carbon emissions? Less than 4%. Even with all our industries. So why are we supposed to reduce our coal, our liquefied gas or anything else? We are saying we don’t need to transition according to the templates or the command of anyone who is not an African.

For any transition to be just, it must put communities at the centre. It must not promote ‘accumulation by decarbonization’. We have to ask, who is benefiting from carbon credits? We are creating an artificial product. They say: ‘you guys in Africa with your huge forest, you can sell your forest to a company somewhere else, who pays for it instead of reducing their emissions’. Why are they not addressing the source of emissions? Why are they coming here to say: make sure you don’t deforest this forest. Then communities cannot do what they used to do or are displaced.

People are also displaced for mining. And are they benefitting from these things? Of course not. So they have the right to say ‘no’. The extraction of these minerals is only 0,6% of the total value chain, and people are being removed from their ancestral lands for that. So, the transition has to be just according to what we define as just.

Katie: Thank you so much. Can I ask you all to share some final closing words?

Thea: Thank you. Despite my Latin American family roots and having spent a lot of time in Latin America, I speak from the United States, even if my research and my solidarity work is transnational. I say this because we are primarily focusing on the opportunities and constraints for Global South countries and resistance movements. But Global North policies and institutions have a big role in shaping the ‘rules of the game’. Global inequality in decision-making power and access to capital, investment and finance, is real.

One direction to take future conversations is: what can people like me – internationally-oriented but Global-North-based experts, advocates and organisers – do in the Global North to change those realities? Can we pressure our own governments to design policies that are less discriminatory towards the Global South, and less constraining for Global South development? How do we think of Global North industrial policies? New policies in the US and Europe are either agnostic or harmful towards Global South development needs. What can I do to organise other experts and movements? What would it look like to build a broader social base in the US for more internationally minded and global justice-oriented policies?

This is hard because the US is not a monolith – there are poor, working class, struggling people, people of colour, migrants, indigenous people here. They may not view themselves at all as beneficiaries of Global North industrial policies—which might make them more open to a left-internationalist agenda.  And there are more and more transnational connections between movements, across the North and South- we see this with the international movement in solidarity with Palestine, for example. We are organising across national boundaries, increasingly intersecting with other terrains of struggle, like worker and labour struggles. There is also coordination across North and South among marginalised communities on the frontlines of mining and fossil fuel resistance, between South American and North American indigenous communities, and non-indigenous but marginalised communities. There is a transnational movement of anti-extractive resistance, and that is quite interesting.

Lastly, there is also exciting stuff happening across the US-Mexico border, with more labour solidarity in battery and auto supply chains. That has been a new priority of the United Auto Workers, under new and more progressive leadership. The critical open question is: where is the pressure within the Global North, among societies and voters towards their own governments, to do something different around industrial policy, and the architecture of trade and finance. Because these are constraining Global South development and more transformative possibilities.

Katie: Thank you so much for those reflections. I will pass to Kennedy, and then Lala.

Kennedy: Climate change is a threat multiplier. We are hit by drought, floods, extreme weather conditions, which multiply the crises we are already facing: conflict, wars, underdevelopment or de-industrialization. What are the national effects? We are seeing climate conflict and fragility. Floods in one part of a country force people to move. In South Sudan, people rely on cattle, but because of drought, they move to find water and greener pastures, and end up competing for those resources. It can turn deadly, because they enter into huge conflicts.

What is to be done? We are calling for climate change reparations, ecological reparations, to make sure that people on the move are compensated for their livelihoods. People who are trapped, unable to move, due to climate change also need to be compensated. We need to make sure any kind of Green Climate Fund goes to them as well.

On the geopolitics of critical minerals in the African copper belt - the DRC, Rwanda, Namibia and Zambia: the EU and the US are coming as a collective but signing deals as individual countries. They are reconstructing the rail system, spending some 2.3 billion dollars in order to export raw ores containing for cobalt, lithium or other critical minerals from DRC, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Zambia, to the EU or America. And we also see the Chinese, refurbishing the Tazara Railway Line starting from Zambia via Dar es Salaam. It is all about extracting natural resources in their raw form. There is no African agency there.

We are calling on our African governments to say, let us up the game, to make sure African agency is all over the negotiation and the implementation of these deals, around value addition and as beneficiaries of the minerals from the continent. To ensure the common people on the margins of social and economic issues also benefit.

Katie: Thank you so much, Kennedy, for highlighting how the critical mineral economy is reinscribing imperialist economic patterns, so that migration justice and reparations are both part of climate justice and any kind of just transition. Lala, any closing thoughts?

Lala: What Kennedy was saying about climate change being a threat multiplier is 100% true. It’s clear we cannot rely on a system motivated by profit maximization with states de-risking private investment. That will not take us to a just transition.

Taking back these decision-making processes is hard because we are asking: suppose we have to mine to some extent, who does the wealth of these resources belong to? And in whose name are we going to develop it? Even within a country, even within a multi-national state, those are questions that get to the heart of democracy and sovereignty. So, the tensions are real, the differences are real. But it is important to remember that these common struggles, grievances and demands are also real, and that is what we have to stand on in order to move forward.

Talking about differences, we are often siloed into ‘community energy’ vs. ‘centralised energy’, or ‘community ownership’ vs. ‘state ownership,’ when talking about energy. But there is a wealth of visions that we can build on along that spectrum. We have public-community ownership, or public-public ownership that incorporates community decision-making. We have co-ops. Different solutions will respond to different political needs.

I’m drawing inspiration from Colombia, and our vice-president Francia Márquez, who was an anti-illegal mining activist from Cauca, and was displaced from her land by an illegal mining company. She led a 10-day, 350-mile march of black women, primarily, to Bogota, which won a victory. The fact that today she is our vice-president means that people who have lived through these experiences can say: ‘when the white, wealthy families of Colombia say that communities are preventing development, we say: what development?’ She said: ‘In my community I had no drinking water, even though the minerals that fuelled Colombia’s wealth were extracted from my land. So when I’m in a decision-making position with all my community support, it looks like a different kind of mining that prioritizes historically marginalized and oppressed communities.’ The majority of Colombians and Latin Americans have such experiences along the supply chain.

So who benefits from these, sometimes imagined or exaggerated differences and tensions? Talking to some Chilean workers that were sent to militarize, demobilize and push Mapuche activists and land-defenders off their land, many of them don’t want to do that job. I’m not defending it, but that is what it means to be used as a tool of global capital. They are not going to benefit from those projects either. Once we get to those advanced stages of confrontation, we have failed 10,000 steps before that to build democratic decision-making into the process of creating a just transition. So, as early as possible, we have to strengthen coalitions of communities, workers and progressive policy makers and researchers, and stand on common experiences and grievances.

Katie: Thank you so much all for these rich reflections and for bringing new dimensions, as well as new inspiration and new hope.