Industrial Policy, Green Technology and Critical Minerals

Since the Paris Agreement, decarbonisation targets have presupposed the rapid diffusion of low-emission technologies to the Global South. That diffusion runs into two bottlenecks. The international intellectual property regime, consolidated in TRIPS and extended through TRIPS-plus chapters, organises the circulation of technology in the opposite direction, and the terms of financing and of raw-material pricing add further layers of asymmetry. This area examines under what conditions countries in a peripheral position can retain value when they install segments of green value chains, licensing a technology they do not own, with capital borrowed in a currency they do not issue, and exporting critical minerals whose price they do not control.

The argument guiding the research draws these asymmetries into a single operation, here termed the composite green-industrialisation transaction, which deteriorates through four mutually constitutive channels of appropriation: the productive-structural, the proprietary, the financial and the biophysical. The green, digital and geopolitical transitions function as a critical juncture, an interval in which this configuration becomes open to reorganisation. In this area we adopt the concept of the "green deterioration of the terms of trade" which, built from the structuralist tradition and dependency theory, seeks to articulate the four channels as a way of analysing processes of peripheral industrialisation in a context of transitions and geopolitical competition.