A Dirty Path to a Clean Future? EU Critical Raw Materials Policy and its Limits
This project examines the European Union's emerging governance framework for critical raw materials (CRMs), which are essential to the green and digital transitions but are also associated with geopolitical dependencies and significant environmental and social costs. It asks whether current EU policy is capable of securing resilient supply chains while adequately accounting for the trade-offs linked to the extraction and processing of CRMs. The project combines legal analysis with policy research. It maps the main tools through which the EU seeks to govern access to CRMs (focusing on legislative instruments, external partnerships and defensive trade measures) and develops a database covering their enforcement mechanisms, the raw materials and deposits concerned, and their substantive content. It further analyses to what extent policy evaluation mechanisms related to these instruments have considered the environmental and social consequences of CRM extraction, and, ultimately, how trade-offs between strategic capacity-building and extraction-related costs are framed and weighed by public authorities. The academic part of the fellowship will be conducted at the Chair of Transnational Law at the University of Warsaw; the non-academic part will draw on the expertise of analysts at the Polish Institute of International Affairs, a think tank advising Polish government officials and diplomats.
