Critical minerals such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, graphite and rare earths are increasingly central to the global economy, underpinning the energy transition, artificial intelligence, digital infrastructure and advanced manufacturing. Yet their governance remains fragmented. As major powers compete to secure access to minerals and processing capacity, emerging rules risk being shaped by geopolitical competition rather than inclusive multilateral cooperation.
Governing Critical Minerals: Histories, Gaps, Actions and Innovative Models, by Michael Franczak and Irfana Khatoon, examines what this changing landscape means for resource-rich producer countries. Drawing on historical experience and models from other areas of global governance, the report examines how rising demand presents both an opportunity and a risk: producer countries could use their resources to support industrialization, economic diversification and greater value creation, or remain concentrated in extraction while higher-value activities take place elsewhere.
The report identifies gaps in the emerging governance architecture, including limited negotiating capacity among producer countries, constraints on domestic value addition, fragmented international initiatives, and insufficient mechanisms for managing market and environmental risks. It argues that no single institution can address these challenges. Instead, it proposes a layered architecture that draws on models from other areas of international cooperation, combining different institutions and approaches to give producer countries a more meaningful role in shaping the rules governing their resources.
The report identifies five priorities for critical minerals governance and matches each with relevant models for addressing them:
- Build legitimate global coordination, including consideration of an International Minerals Agency. While the IEA offers a model for effective consumer coordination around market data and risks, the IAEA provides a model for broader membership, UN auspices and technical cooperation between producer and consumer countries.
- Strengthen producer countries’ negotiating capacity by pooling technical and legal expertise and advocating for model contract provisions. The African Legal Support Facility and new Borrowers’ Platform offer models for pooling expertise and strengthening negotiating capacity, while the spread of collective action and debt-pause clauses show how governments can coordinate strategically around changes to contractual and statutory frameworks.
- Protect policy space for value addition through trade governance. Consumer clubs can move quickly but give producers limited influence, while multilateral treaties offer broader participation but take time. WTO plurilateral cooperation offers a middle ground, using an existing body to develop rules on technical assistance, geological cooperation and time-bound industrial measures.
- Develop durable mechanisms for market and environmental risks. Commodity price stabilization efforts in the 1970s offer precedents for addressing price volatility and dependence, while the International Oil Pollution Compensation Funds offer a model for funding environmental remediation through industry levies.
- Embed accountability and community participation by giving affected communities a formal seat in governance. The Kimberley Process offers a partial model through its tripartite structure of governments, industry and civil society. A critical minerals framework could build on this by becoming quadripartite, with communities represented alongside these three groups.
Together, these actions could shift critical minerals governance away from fragmented competition towards a more stable, transparent and equitable system—one that gives producer countries greater capacity to shape how their resources are developed, where value is created and who benefits.
This report is an output of UNU-CPR’s Global Governance Innovation Platform, which identifies and examines innovative institutional models and mechanisms that can be adapted to address global challenges and collective action problems.
