Across Latin America, lithium, copper and other resources central to renewable energy technologies are drawing heightened interest from governments and companies alike. But behind the headlines of green progress lies a more complex story – one shaped by long-standing tensions over resource governance, territorial rights and economic sovereignty.
Thea Riofrancos, a political scientist at Providence College in Rhode Island, United States, and a member of the Climate + Community Institute think-tank, has spent over a decade investigating these dynamics across the Americas and Europe.
Her research focuses on the intersection of extraction, climate politics and social movements, with a particular interest in how the energy transition is reshaping global power relations. In her upcoming book, Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism, she explores the conflicts and contradictions embedded in the green economy.
In this interview with Dialogue Earth, Riofrancos discusses the dilemmas facing many Latin American governments as they navigate competing pressures: generating revenue from their mineral wealth, while responding to civil society demands for environmental and social protections. She reflects on the resurgence of resource nationalism in the region, the global competition for supply chain control, and the growing influence of Indigenous and grassroots movements that are resisting the expansion of extractive industries.
Dialogue Earth: How did you become interested in researching the political economy and social conflicts surrounding extraction in Latin America?
Thea Riofrancos: I had a long interest in Latin American politics and social movements in college. It was the early years of the “pink tide” [the region’s widespread turn towards left-wing governments in the early 2000s]. I was following with great interest what was happening with presidents Morales in Bolivia, the Kirchners in Argentina and Chavez in Venezuela.
As a progressive in the United States, it was inspiring to see so many progressive governments in power. After I graduated, I moved to Ecuador, and had already been to Argentina and Bolivia. I started to see some of the complexity of these resources and how important they were to the programmes of those governments: they were trying to do something different to neoliberalism, but also trying to expand investment in those sectors to then fund social programmes and public infrastructure.
This resulted in a conflict in which, on the one hand, there was broad social support for – using the revenues from extraction to address the social debt – and on the other hand, you had long-standing territorial movements defending their territories and livelihoods.
The question that animated me then was what dilemmas extractive sectors pose to Global South governments and societies. Later, I ended up getting interested in how this question re-emerges in the context of green technology supply chains.
We have the climate crisis and the technologies that are designed to decarbonise sectors of the economy, and it turns out that those require mining. The situation can feel like a conflict between addressing climate change and exacerbating an ecological and water crisis on a global scale. That is why I ended up looking at lithium as one of many critical minerals.
What are some of the common denominators you have found in your research in the region, now entering a new extraction phase with critical minerals for the energy transition?
Latin America is playing, and is going to play even more so, a major role in supplying the world economy with minerals that are relevant to the energy transition. There’s also a renewal of resource nationalism in the region, which is a cyclical political concept in Latin America.
Now, there’s an interest in having the state more involved, either through contract negotiation or state-owned companies. The centrality of the region in these markets gives it leverage, and getting involved can be attractive to the state. We also see ambition to move up the supply chain, either through state or private-sector initiatives.
High prices of these minerals can incentivise governments to seek revenue to benefit societies. But there’s a flip side to that: are these going to be volatile boom-and-bust sectors that take the region through a similar pattern of economic insecurity? Individual countries have little power over prices.
You are promoting the sector, getting the state involved, trying to convince civil society this is a good idea, but there’s uncertainty. Are Latin American societies going to benefit from this? This plays into a long history of protest in the region, now with a remobilisation of movements targeted at these minerals.
For your upcoming book, you did fieldwork in Chile, the United States and Portugal to look at lithium extraction. What did you find that is shared between those countries?
Supply chains have become so geopolitically salient that they are part of this new cold war dynamic between the United States, China and Europe. Everyone wants to develop supply chains, but the question is: what about the Global South?
Countries are caught in a competition between multiple powers trying to get their resources, and they could either benefit from this competition or end up having little leverage or power. If you are a Latin American government, and a Chinese company is approaching you with one deal and the United States with another, it may be better to have options and leverage.
We see some evidence of that in Indonesia. It’s positioning itself in an interesting way in the supply chain with Chinese investment, but also protecting western investment and upgrading its position in the supply chain.
Chile is where this book started and where it was inspired. But then I visited other places in the world. I found a lot of commonalities, in ways that surprised me, in protests and civil society. Indigenous peoples in the United States and Canada have similar demands, grievances and protest tactics to Indigenous peoples in Latin America.
They feel excluded, they protest, they sometimes get repressed, they ask for clean water and want a voice in the decision-making process. It’s a global, transnational movement with direct or indirect coordination, making similar arguments, and with a similar vision on what an ecologically sound energy transition would look like.
In a recent op-ed, you highlighted the importance of having international agreements on environmental and social standards to reduce mineral demand. Colombia has led calls for an agreement on critical minerals traceability, and the UN created a panel of experts to study the issue. Is this making a difference?
They are not enough, but they could be a first step if they solidify a bit more. International and regional-scale cooperation is very important. Global South countries on their own are not very powerful in the world system, but when they can ally with one another, they have a lot more power to prevent that “race to the bottom” in [lowering] regulation [to attract investment].
Even beyond economic leverage, there is just a need for some calibration of social and environmental governance. Now, the governance in places like Argentina is extremely weak, and that makes the country and its people vulnerable to predatory behaviour from corporations.
In your 2019 book A Planet to Win, you argued that all politics are climate politics, and highlighted the need for urgent climate action, such as dismantling the fossil fuel industry. How far do we remain from that happening?
We could make the argument that there was progress. There was a moment between 2019 and 2022 when civil society mobilisation led to governments adopting new policies on climate. It even seemed that oil companies were starting to get worried. Now that momentum has stalled and geopolitics around energy has strengthened the power of the fossil fuels industry, with record profits following.
However, if you look at the purely technological and economic indicators, there’s still progress. We have more deployment of solar panels and wind turbines in the Global South. All of this together is why scholars use the term “energy addition” rather than “energy transition”: it’s more of everything, which is not what the climate science tells us to do. It’s good that solar panels are cheap and that many people can afford them, but what we are not seeing is a wholesale transition away from fossil fuels.
Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism is set to be published in September 2025 by W.W. Norton
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