Critical minerals—including lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, graphite and rare earths—are foundational to the twenty-first-century economy. They are essential to the energy transition, but also to artificial intelligence, digital infrastructure and advanced manufacturing. Demand is projected to nearly double by 2040 under current policy settings, with demand for lithium more than tripling and demand for nickel, graphite and rare earths rising substantially.
For countries with significant mineral resources, this could create major opportunities. But rising demand alone will not determine who captures the value. Critical minerals are extracted largely in developing countries, processed predominantly in China and consumed mainly in advanced industrial economies. The governance arrangements emerging around them remain fragmented across national policies, bilateral agreements, investment treaties, voluntary standards and competing geopolitical initiatives.
At the same time, consumer governments are moving quickly to secure supply. The United States is investing in domestic mining and processing while negotiating supply arrangements abroad. The European Union is expanding domestic production and processing while building strategic partnerships with mineral-producing countries, including in Africa and Latin America. And new consumer-producer clubs are emerging to coordinate investment, trade and access. The Minerals Security Partnership Forum, for example, brings major consumer countries together with mineral-producing countries, while the G7's Critical Minerals Resilience and Production Alliance is developing a buyers' club to attract investment and diversify supply.
Together, these initiatives are creating a de facto governance architecture for critical minerals, largely outside multilateral processes and guided by great power politics. As demand grows for the energy transition, artificial intelligence and digital infrastructure, that architecture may determine development trajectories for decades to come. The time for concrete, practical interventions is now.
A familiar problem in a new form
The extraction and exchange of raw materials between rich and poor countries have a long history of exploitation, often under colonial or semi-colonial relationships. After the Second World War, developing countries organized through the UN system to challenge this international division of labour. Through UNCTADand the Group of 77, they argued that commodity exporters faced a structural barrier in their “terms of trade”as the prices of raw materials failed to keep pace with the cost of imported manufactured goods.
The high point of this effort was the 1970s effort toward a New International Economic Order (NIEO), which sought to give developing countries greater control over international trade, investment and natural resources.OPEC was part of this broader political moment: the oil price shock of 1973–74 demonstrated the bargaining power that resource-rich developing countries could exercise when they acted collectively.
The NIEO did not succeed as a political project. But the effort to reshape commodity markets produced institutional experiments, including international commodity agreements and the Common Fund for Commodities. The European Community established STABEX to stabilize export earnings for African, Caribbean and Pacific countries, while the IMF created the Compensatory Financing Facility to support commodity exporters facing temporary shortfalls due to price shocks.
The oil crisis and NIEO also produced a different institutional response from developed countries. The Group of Six was created in 1975, when France, West Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States met at Rambouillet to coordinate on economic problems following the oil shock and global recession. Canada joined the following year, creating the G7. The International Energy Agency (IEA) was also established in 1974 by OECD countries to strengthen energy security and coordinate among major consumers.
These institutions reflected different responses to the changing global economy. Producer countries sought greater collective influence over markets and the terms of resource exchange. Consumer countries built institutions to coordinate among themselves and manage supply risks.
Today, governments are again using industrial policy and international cooperation to secure access to strategic resources. The difference is that the institutions emerging around critical minerals are being shaped largely through national strategies, bilateral agreements and smaller groups of countries. This raises a familiar question in a new context: who has the capacity to shape the rules governing resources that are increasingly central to the global economy?
Building a layered architecture
The de facto governance architecture for critical minerals is already taking shape. The question is how it can become more inclusive and better equipped to address the interests of producer countries and affected communities.
There is no single institutional model that can solve these problems. Our research instead looks for models and precedents for cooperation in the UN system and beyond, where governments have confronted similar challenges.
The aim is not to replicate these institutions wholesale. It is to identify features that could be adapted to the governance challenges emerging around critical minerals. The goal is to build arrangements that give producer countries greater bargaining power, help them capture more value from their resources, and ensure that affected communities have a meaningful voice. Our research identifies five practical approaches:
1. Build an International Minerals Agency—incrementally
Critical minerals governance lacks an institution responsible for shared geological information, market intelligence and long-term supply and demand analysis. Several proposals for an international minerals agency have drawn on the International Energy Agency (IEA) as a precedent. But its origins and membership also highlight a limitation: an agency modeled on the IEA would privilege the priorities of major consumer economies over those producers.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) offers another model, with a broader membership and a mandate established under UN auspices. A minerals agency could draw on the latter approach by giving both producing and consuming countries a role in its governance. It could start with geological data, market monitoring and supply-and-demand forecasts rather than building a large new bureaucracy.
2. Strengthen producer countries' negotiating capacity
Producer governments need greater capacity to assess mining agreements, infrastructure proposals, investment terms and supply contracts before they are signed. Existing institutions offer useful building blocks. The African Legal Support Facility provides legal expertise, while C-MINK provides a platform for critical-minerals knowledge and cooperation.
Sovereign debt also offers relevant precedents. Collective Action Clauses emerged in the 2000s as part of efforts to strengthen the sovereign debt restructuring process, while more recently, debt-pause clauses have provided a way to temporarily suspend debt service after specified shocks. Additionally, the new Borrowers' Platform gives developing-country borrowers a space to exchange experience and strengthen technical capacity. Similar cooperation could help producer countries leverage experience and expertise and coordinate around the spread of model provisions or clauses.
3. Protect policy space for value addition through trade governance
Trade rules shape market access, supply chain standards and the policy space available to countries seeking to develop their industries. Three approaches offer different options. Consumer-led plurilateral agreements can establish standards and preferential market access relatively quickly, but producers may have little say in setting the rules. A binding multilateral treaty could provide broader participation and address environmental, social and human rights concerns, but would be difficult to negotiate.
A WTO plurilateral could offer a more neutral venue, using existing committees and membership to develop good practices on geological cooperation, technical assistance and time-bound industrial measures. These approaches could work alongside one another, provided producer countries have a meaningful role in shaping the rules.
4. Develop durable mechanisms for market and environmental risks
Critical minerals create different kinds of financial and environmental risks, and these require different institutional responses. Commodity price stabilization efforts in the 1970s—including international commodity agreements, the European Community's STABEX scheme and the IMF's Compensatory Financing Facility—offer precedents for addressing price volatility and dependence on a small number of exports, although financing and governance proved difficult.
Environmental liabilities require a different approach. The UN Secretary-General’s Panel on Critical Energy Transition Minerals has proposed a Global Mining Legacy Fund for abandoned and ownerless mines, along with an International Taskforce to develop its financing model and pilot it in mineral-producing developing countries. The International Oil Pollution Compensation Funds offer a useful precedent: industry contributions are pooled to compensate for environmental damage when responsible parties cannot cover the full cost. A mining fund could adapt this approach to finance remediation of legacy sites, while requiring active mining companies to cover their own closure and cleanup costs.
5. Embed accountability and community participation
The legitimacy of critical minerals governance will depend partly on whether affected communities have a meaningful role in decisions that shape their livelihoods and environments. Responsible-sourcing frameworks, certification systems and traceability initiatives provide foundations for stronger oversight, but their proliferation can also produce fragmented requirements and uneven implementation.
Governments and international institutions could build on existing frameworks, including OECD Due Diligence Guidance for Responsible Supply Chains of Minerals and the Great Lakes Regional Certification Mechanism. The Kimberley Process offers a partial model: its tripartite governance brings together governments, industry and civil society. A critical minerals framework could build on this structure by becoming quadripartite, giving affected communities a formal seat in governance alongside these three groups. Community representation could be complemented by monitoring and grievance mechanisms that give affected populations a role in identifying harms and reviewing implementation.
Building a different kind of architecture
These five priorities address different parts of the governance problem. An international minerals agency could provide shared information and coordination. Producer networks could strengthen bargaining capacity. Trade governance could protect policy space for value addition. Risk-sharing mechanisms could address market and environmental liabilities. Accountability and community participation could strengthen responsible sourcing and oversight.
The United Nations can help connect these efforts without trying to manage the mineral economy itself. Its comparative advantage lies in convening governments, establishing legitimate rules and standards, supporting cooperation across institutions and giving countries with less market power a place at the table.
The formal and informal institutions emerging around critical minerals must do more than secure supply. They should give resource-rich countries greater scope to capture value and pursue their own development priorities.
