A new international research initiative launched in Accra this week is setting out to answer a question its own lead researcher says the mining sector has never properly resolved: what does justice actually mean when it comes to critical minerals?
Speaking at the launch of the Minerals Governance and Energy Transition Project a research collaboration spanning Ghana, Chile and Australia, Project Lead Dr Clement Sefa-Nyarko said the central obstacle to fairer mineral governance is not a lack of policy, but a lack of shared understanding of the term at the heart of the debate.
“The main challenge is that we do not have a common understanding of what justice is,” he said, noting that governments, mining communities, traditional authorities and civil society groups routinely talk past each other because each is applying a different definition.
A Tale of Competing Definitions
According to Dr Sefa-Nyarko, governments tend to frame justice around economic management, securing an orderly transition away from fossil-fuel dependent economies.
Communities living on mineral-rich land, by contrast, measure justice in far more immediate terms: what tangible benefit they see from mining and energy-transition activity happening on their doorstep.
“Community members think about justice in terms of how they can benefit from any process that transitions us from fossil-based technologies to cleaner ones,” he said.
He argued that this gap has persisted partly because the dominant frameworks for thinking about extractive justice were built elsewhere. “Most of these conceptions of justice are viewed from a Global North perspective. There is often no holistic and comprehensive conception of justice that brings everyone to the table,” Dr Sefa-Nyarko said, adding that the lived experience of resource-rich countries has been largely absent from the theoretical debate.
Why Ghana, Chile and Australia
Rather than studying Ghana in isolation, the project has been designed as a three-country comparison spanning Ghana, Chile and Australia to examine how perceptions of justice in the governance and extraction of minerals such as lithium, graphite and cobalt differ across mining host communities in different political and economic contexts.
The comparative design, researchers say, is intended to surface patterns and gaps in how justice is understood that a single-country study would miss, and to feed local knowledge from affected populations directly into policy conversations rather than treating it as an afterthought.
Beyond Compensation
The launch also featured remarks from Mr Samuel A. Jinapor, Former Minister for Lands and Natural Resources, who pushed back on the tendency to treat mining communities as passive “stakeholders.”
He said communities are, in fact, the people whose lands, livelihoods and environments bear the direct brunt of extraction — and that justice for them must extend beyond compensation payments to genuine participation in decision-making.
He added that transparent, inclusive governance processes make communities more likely to support mining projects, and reiterated the case for resource-rich countries to capture greater value from their mineral wealth through local participation, value addition, technology transfer and skills development.
He noted the International Energy Agency’s projection that demand for critical minerals could triple by 2030 and quadruple by 2040 if the world is to meet net-zero targets, and pointed out that Africa sits at the centre of this demand: the Democratic Republic of Congo alone holds over half of the world’s cobalt reserves, while Zambia leads in copper and countries including Ghana, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Mali, Mozambique, Madagascar and Tanzania hold significant lithium, graphite and manganese deposits.
According to him, the discourse on justice in critical minerals must operate simultaneously on three levels: justice between nations, justice between states and communities, and justice between present and future generations.
He pointed to Ghana’s own experience with bauxite and aluminium, where the country exports raw bauxite and imports refined alumina for smelting, as a cautionary tale.
To avoid repeating this pattern with lithium, Jinapor said Ghana’s Cabinet approved a green minerals policy setting a minimum royalty rate of 7 percent, a minimum of 30 percent state and Ghanaian participation in green minerals operations, and requirements for local content, local listing on the Ghana stock exchange, and value addition.
He noted that Ghana’s first lithium mining lease was signed on a 10 percent royalty rate, with government also pushing for the establishment of a domestic refinery, a first for the country.
He also referenced the African Union’s African Green Minerals Strategy, adopted in 2025, and urged African countries to adopt a common negotiating position through the African Continental Free Trade Area, whose secretariat is based in Accra.
He argued that the true measure of success should not be tonnes extracted or export revenue recorded, but whether mineral wealth is converted into lasting assets; infrastructure, education and technological capacity that outlast the minerals themselves.
Jinapor closed by thanking UK Research and Innovation and project partners King’s College London and the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, for their role in the initiative.
Josephine Badoo, Director of Research at the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources, also addressed the gathering as part of the launch proceedings.
According to her Ghana must adopt a mineral governance framework that balances economic growth and investment with environmental protection, community participation and long-term sustainability.
Josephine Badoo, said the country’s transition towards green and critical minerals must not result in another cycle of dependence on the export of raw materials.
She said Ghana’s commitment to responsible mineral development was supported by its ratification of major international environmental agreements, including the Paris Agreement and the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer.
She said Ghana had also developed policy measures to position the country to benefit more from emerging opportunities in the global green minerals industry.
The Ghana launch signals the commencement of the project’s in-country research, which will explore the relationship between mining, communities and policymaking.
The study will examine both formal governance structures and informal forms of cultural expression, including music, film and community art, to gain a deeper understanding of how justice in the critical minerals sector is perceived at the national, local and community levels.
