Justice in Critical Minerals Governance and Energy Transitions Project
Justice in Critical Minerals Governance and Energy Transitions is a four year UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship (2025-2029) that investigates how justice is understood and negotiated in the global transition to net-zero emissions.
Contestations over social, environmental, and distributional justice have contributed to policy delays, community resistance, supply chain disruptions, and escalating tensions between governments, companies, and Indigenous Peoples and local communities. These tensions around the meaning and manifestation of justice often lead to policy delays, community protests, and disruptions in global supply chains for lithium and other key minerals.
To address this challenge, the project pioneers Hermeneutical Ethnography, a new methodology that systematically analyses speech, texts, symbols, storytelling, and silences to understand how communities express their aspirations and concerns. The approach helps us address some of the persistent gaps between top down energy transition policies and the lived realities of mining communities.
By generating interdisciplinary, empirical data from case studies in Australia, Chile, and Ghana, the project produces a systematic framework for mitigating transition-related impacts and offers robust practical guidance for integrating justice into global governance processes beyond 2030.The unique approach of co creating knowledge with mining-affected communities and stakeholders in Australia, Chile, and Ghana will help reveal perspectives often excluded from policy design.
The fellowship will generate:
- A bottom-up justice framework for energy transitions
- New interdisciplinary datasets on mining experiences
- Evidence for policymakers and global institutions
- Strategic partnerships that support the post 2030 sustainable development agenda.
Through its focus on justice, meaning-making, and community voices, the project contributes to building fairer, more sustainable, and more resilient energy transitions worldwide.
This website offers a space for sharing updates, events, research outputs, and other project-related information.
Partners
- Centre for Environmental Governance, University of Canberra, Australia.
- Institute for Ecology and Biodiversity, University of Conception, Chile.
- Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon, Ghana.
- Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources, Government of Ghana, Ghana.
Aims
The project aims to transform how justice is understood and integrated into the global transition to net zero emissions.
It seeks to develop a new, community centred knowledge system that reveals how people living in mining regions interpret and experience justice during critical minerals extraction. Through Hermeneutical Ethnography, the project aims to capture the voices, silences, symbols and stories that are typically missing from policy debates.
Within the four-year period, the fellowship aims to build a practical, bottom up framework that supports more equitable decisions by governments, industry, and international organisations as they shape the future of sustainable development beyond the 2030 SDGs.
Methods
The Methodology:Hermeneutical Ethnography is the project’s core approach. It combines hermeneutics (interpreting meaning) with ethnography (immersive study of everyday life) to understand how communities express justice in direct and indirect ways.
What are Collected:
- Voices: interviews, conversations, stories, folklores, local media, audiovisuals, documentaries, protests, speeches.
- Silences: boycotts, silent protests and topics avoided, withheld, or politically sensitive.• Symbols & Non Verbal Expressions: gestures, practices, rituals, art, community behaviour.
- Context: local histories, relationships, political dynamics, mining establishments, cultures and ways of life.
How the Method Works:
- Immersion: building trust and understanding everyday life in mining affected communities.
- Listening & observing in-person: capturing spoken and unspoken expressions of justice mining, environmental sustainability, livelihoods through direct and indirect engagements.
- Digital platforms: capturing spoken and unspoken expressions of justice, mining, environmental sustainability, livelihoods that are available on digital platforms.
- Co interpretation: working with communities to make sense of emerging insights.
- Cross case analysis: comparing findings from Australia, Chile, and Ghana.
- Partnership building: working with partners across the three project countries and across the world to co-create and socialise the emerging insights of justice.
- Framework Development: synthesising evidence into a bottom up justice framework.
Why the Methodology Matters:
This approach reveals perspectives that are often overlooked in policy and academic debates, especially those emerging from everyday community experiences rather than formal consultations. By moving beyond traditional “boardroom” research designs, which frequently embed researcher assumptions, institutional biases, and pre determined analytical frames, the methodology places genuine interpretive power in the hands of communities themselves.
Because Hermeneutical Ethnography relies on organic, lived, and locally grounded knowledge systems, it captures how justice is expressed through voices, silences, symbols, and social practices. This community centred way of knowing strengthens local agency, enriches analytical depth, and produces practical, context sensitive evidence to support fairer, more trusted, and more resilient energy transitions.
Principal Investigator
Lecturer in Security, Development and Leadership in Africa
Affiliations
Funding
Funding Body: UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)
Amount: £2.3 million
Period: December 2025 - November 2029