Highlights

• The World Bank's new minerals strategy arrives amid geopolitical rivalry and social resistance.
• It requires correction beyond clean transition narratives to address defense procurement, export controls, and bilateral deals shaping NdPr, lithium, and nickel supply chains.
• Durable economic gains emerge from knowledge-intensive supplier ecosystems such as engineering services, environmental monitoring, and separation chemistry.
• This has been demonstrated in countries like Chile, Brazil, and South Africa.
• Community legitimacy now functions as critical infrastructure.
• Water conflicts and environmental backlash represent tangible schedule, cost, and financing risks.
• These conflicts can transform strategic assets into stranded projects in securitized supply chains.

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The World Bank’s forthcoming minerals and mining strategy (opens in a new tab) arrives at a moment when critical minerals have slipped the polite language of development economics and entered the harsher terrain of geopolitics, industrial rivalry, and social resistance. Anabel Marín’s intervention is not radical; it is corrective. She argues that the Bank’s familiar narrative—clean transition, institutional reform, foreign investment—no longer matches the lived reality of rare earths, lithium, nickel, and the supply chains that now surround them.

From a Rare Earth Exchanges™ perspective, this framing matters. The global race for NdPr, Dy, Tb, lithium, and nickel is not being shaped by abstract sustainability goals alone, but by defense procurement, export controls, and tightly negotiated bilateral deals. Any strategy that fails to integrate these forces risks becoming aspirational literature rather than operational policy.

Where the Analysis Holds Its Ground

Marín is at her strongest when she dismantles the illusion that “value addition” means simply building downstream battery plants. In practice, the most durable gains in mineral economies have emerged in supplier ecosystems—engineering services, environmental monitoring, automation, and geotechnical problem-solving. This aligns closely with observed success cases in Chile, Brazil, and South Africa, and with investor reality: supplier capabilities travel; raw materials do not.

Her emphasis on knowledge-intensive diversification is particularly relevant for rare earth supply chains, where separation chemistry, metallurgical precision, and environmental controls—not ore grades alone—determine who captures value. The argument that innovation policy, rather than capital inflows alone, underwrites long-term resilience is well supported by decades of industrial-policy evidence.

The Soft Edges of Policy Optimism

Where the analysis begins to soften is in its treatment of collective South–South bargaining and multilateral coordination. While initiatives such as the African Green Minerals Alliance are conceptually sound, history suggests that coordination fractures quickly under price volatility, fiscal stress, or bilateral pressure from major consuming states. This is not misinformation, but it is a constraint that deserves more weight.

Export bans are similarly framed as tools that merely require better planning. Indonesia’s nickel experience remains the exception, not the template. For most rare earth and lithium producers, restrictive trade policies without embedded technical capacity risk deterring capital rather than catalyzing domestic capability.

The Supply Chain Reality Check

What makes this analysis notable is its insistence that legitimacy itself functions as infrastructure. Community resistance, water conflicts, and environmental backlash are no longer peripheral concerns; they are schedule risks, cost risks, and financing risks. In an increasingly securitized supply-chain environment—where timelines are compressed and safeguards quietly weakened—ignoring legitimacy is no longer neutral. It is destabilizing.

For investors and policymakers alike, the message is clear: critical-minerals strategy must be grounded in political economy, not just ESG language. Otherwise, today’s “strategic assets” risk becoming tomorrow’s stranded projects.

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