Mineral Resource Governance: Geopolitics, Socio-Environmental Justice, and Circular Frameworks in the Energy Transition

This Research Topic establishes a multidisciplinary, critical forum focused on proposing new mineral resource governance models that move beyond purely corporate approaches, integrating macroeconomic sustainability, state sovereignty, and socio-environmental justice. The central focus is to examine how mineral governance can mitigate territorial conflicts and global asymmetries within the energy transition scenario. To achieve this, the topic seeks to transcend voluntary corporate ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) metrics by investigating public and community-led frameworks that guarantee the rights of frontline populations and secure global supply chains without replicating historical predatory dynamics. Ultimately, this collection aims to address how regulatory frameworks can mediate the friction between the urgency of decarbonization and the preservation of ecological and social integrity in extractive territories.

The global transition toward low-carbon technologies has triggered an unprecedented demand for critical raw materials, pushing extractive frontiers and challenging existing regulatory regimes. While primary mining continues to face the stigma of severe historical and ecological liabilities, mitigation strategies strictly based on traditional Mining Law and conventional environmental licensing have proven insufficient. In parallel, although Urban Mining and the Circular Economy emerge as indispensable pathways to reduce reliance on primary extraction, they face strict thermodynamic, logistical, and scalability barriers that hinder the complete closure of material loops under the current geometric growth in demand. Consequently, a theoretical and empirical evolution is required—one that structurally connects life-cycle management, ecological economics, and political ecology to decipher the complex, non-linear dynamics of the contemporary mineral sector.

The scope of this topic encompasses original research articles, systematic reviews, and policy case studies exploring the legal, political, economic, and environmental dimensions of extractive activities. We highly encourage submissions that offer robust empirical evidence or innovative theoretical frameworks across the following thematic axes:

• Environmental Justice and Conflict Resolution: Territorial socio-environmental impacts, rights of local and indigenous communities.

• Geopolitics and Global Asymmetries of Critical Raw Materials: Critical analyses of power dynamics, resource nationalism, and metabolic material flows between resource-exporting countries (Global South) and technology-importing nations (Global North).

• Limits and Potentials of the Circular Economy and Urban Mining: Biophysical and thermodynamic assessments, infrastructure bottlenecks, and scalability feasibility for critical mineral recovery from anthropogenic stocks.

• Critique and Evolution of Regulatory Frameworks: Limitations of private corporate ESG metrics compared to public and polycentric governance, and the reform of Mining Law from a multidimensional sustainability perspective.

• Integrated Impact Assessment: Advanced Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Material Flow Analysis (MFA), and metabolic indicators applied to global value chains in the extractive sector.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Community Case Study
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Community Case Study
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: mineral resource governance, socio-environmental justice, energy transition, critical raw materials, circular economy

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.