Critical Raw Materials in the Security–Sustainability Nexus: Fragmentation, Geopolitical Contestation and Accountability

Critical raw materials have moved from the terrain of commercial exchange into that of national security, creating a rapidly expanding but fragmented governance landscape. This introduction to the special issue argues that the central problem is not an absence of governance instruments but their fragmentation across overlapping public, private and hybrid authorities operating at different scales. Building on Riofrancos’ account of a security–sustainability nexus, we show how that nexus becomes institutionalised and with what distributive consequences. Fragmentation is not administrative untidiness that better coordination would resolve. It is the form the securitisation of mineral supply assumes once it meets the plural authorities through which extraction is governed. Because those authorities answer to different constituencies, fragmentation generates an accountability deficit borne unevenly by producer states with thin fiscal and regulatory capacity, by Indigenous Peoples and peasant communities at sites of extraction and processing, and by workers and ecosystems that no supply chain instrument counts. Drawing together contributions on consuming and producing states, transnational governance instruments and community mobilisation, we show that fragmentation does not simply complicate efforts to reconcile supply security and sustainability. Rather, when these objectives conflict, supply security tends to prevail, reshaping how states pursue sustainability, human rights and accountability.