Session Description
From renewable energy technologies to EVs, the global energy transition is highly minerals-intensive. As the transition across energy systems accelerates, demand for energy transition minerals continues to surge. This raises significant concerns, given past experiences with resource extraction. Whether coal, oil, copper, or lithium, resource frontiers have long been sites of inequity, displacement, environmental degradation, and human rights abuses.
This session will critically examine the legacies of past resource extraction and the structural barriers that have historically prevented affected frontline communities from exercising meaningful agency over decisions that shape their lands and livelihoods. We ask 3 pertinent questions: What do past lessons reveal about the deeper cultural, political and economic structures that underpin extractive industries? With the pace and urgency that defines the energy transition, are those structures being reproduced in the current mineral rush? How may Impact Assessment as a practice community prevent past mistakes and guide action towards fair and just outcomes?
We are particularly interested in diverse perspectives (including Indigenous communities) that explore how historical patterns of dispossession and exclusion inform current mining practices, under what conditions communities have successfully asserted control over resource decisions, and what reforms could enable more equitable outcomes.
The aim is to move beyond abstract aspirations for a just transition and to interrogate what justice requires in practice. Are we collectively learning from the past to genuinely inform a different future, or do old habits die hard?
Session Summary
This session will critically examine the legacies of past resource extraction and the structural barriers that have historically prevented affected frontline communities from exercising meaningful agency over decisions that shape their lands, livelihoods, and futures.
Session Chair
Vigya Sharma
The University of Queensland
Australia
Session Co-chair
Rauno Sairinen
University of Eastern Finland
Finland