Ecological and Decolonial Feminist Approaches to European Union Critical Raw Materials Policy

This project fills a significant gap in political ecology literature by critically assessing, through an ecological, decolonial feminist lens, the European Union’s Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA). The CRMA aims to secure and govern new and existing supply chains for the green and digital transitions. An extensive political ecology and critical development studies literature considers neocolonialism and green imperialism when it comes to Global North and EU efforts to secure mineral supplies in producer countries abroad. While gendered dynamics and a masculine ethos, I hypothesize, play a vital role when it comes to EU critical raw materials regulation and policy, the scholarly literature is sorely lacking a feminist theoretical lens and methodological approach to the CRMA’s material and symbolic dimensions. The project objective is therefore to bring an ecological feminist lens to the EU’s growing involvement in securing and governing supply chains of critical raw materials, focusing on the CRMA and its strategic partnership with the Democratic Republic of Congo. This includes examining legal developments, institutional dynamics, and views at EU level, not yet sufficiently explored. Analysis of the role of corporations in the perpetuation of patriarchal, colonial dynamics – through corporate lobbying and action at the epicenter of empire (the EU) – is a key part of this project, given corporate players’ integral involvement with CRMA development. I will creatively combine traditional research methods associated with political science and IR (such as semi-structured interviews and participation in high-level events) with ethnographic and open-ended methods such as participant observation, story-telling, non-linear narratives, and artistic expression. In this manner the project will bring foreground alternative visions of green and just transition, while allowing me to develop my conceptual and methodological skills and profile as an ecological feminist researcher.