Dependent development at the energy transition: placing lithium imaginaries in Neoliberal and Contentious Peru

We examine lithium and development imaginaries in mining-dependent Peru, asking: What are these imaginaries? What narratives underpin them? Who articulates and shares them, and from where? What forms of state (in)action are envisioned in relation to them? The case study elucidates how alternative “imagined futures” coexist within a natural resource–dependent economy. The ruling national elites in Lima have a neoliberal imagination, treating lithium like any other mineral resource in the country. In contrast, professional elites in the mineral-rich but peripheral region of Puno adopt a resource nationalist view, advocating for direct state involvement in lithium industrialization and the transformation of the domestic energy system, shaped by beliefs on Bolivia’s developmental pathway. Among rural community leaders as well as political and social leaders in the districts near lithium and uranium deposits, however, the prevailing idea is that of a social license. In this view, each community has the capacity to negotiate development terms with mining companies independently. In the broader imagination at the resource periphery of a peripheral national economy, the state is perceived primarily as a minimalist governmental actor, necessary only to oversee and ensure the enforcement of mine-community agreements and to provide basic infrastructure. Thus, elites at the political center and communities near expected resource developments converge in their immediate pursuit of rents promised by resource commodification. In the dominant discourses, environmental concerns are often subordinated to economic development goals.