Transnational contestation for local communities within the formation of the European Union’s Critical Raw Materials Act – a critical appraisal

This article presents a critical appraisal of the European Union’s (EU) policy process that delivered the Critical Raw Materials Act, 2023–⁠2024. We combine Marxist-Gramscian perspectives on regional blocs and social movement theory on transnational contestation to study a framing contest at two points in the policy process. First, we examined environmental justice frames in technical campaigns to identify how social and environmental concerns of local communities were used as objects of contestation within the public consultation round. Second, we analyzed the followng proposal from the European Commission and found that its dominant policy frames were constructed around mining-for-sustainability, mining-for-security and public-acceptance-for-mining – incorporating only concerns that were less threatening to mining. We argue that technical campaigns on mining within EU policy processes will deliver outcomes in line with dominant territorial and capitalist interests – unless there are powerful domestic political campaigns that draw on political economic perspectives on environmental politics.