Canada’s Role in the Global Political Economy of Critical Minerals: A Critical Approach to Geopolitics, Resource-making, and Statecraft
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Access to critical minerals is increasingly a point of discussion and action with respect to low-carbon energy transitions and national security priorities (IRENA 2024). This research critically investigates how Canada is positioning itself within an evolving global political economy as a preferred partner and choice supplier of critical minerals through provincial, territorial, and federal strategies. I employ conceptual understandings of resource-making, constituted by discursive and representational techniques (Li 2014), alongside state-making, wherein practices of knowledge production and statecraft enact and render the state coherent (Zhou 2022). Using a methodological approach which combines document analyses and interviews with expert stakeholders, the research identifies intersecting discourses of criticality, urgency, potentiality, security, and responsibility which shape resource becoming and state-making processes (Valdivia et al. 2022). Situated at the productive intersection of critical resource geographies and critical geopolitics, I demonstrate the value of examining Canadian critical mineral strategies through a ‘more-than-mining approach’. Rather than just extraction making possible minerals’ ‘work in the world’, certain resources are constructed as ‘critical’, valuable, and useful through spatio-temporally specific appraisals. A second facet of the framing is its illumination of alternatives along supply chains. Through critical analyses of domestic and extra-territorial initiatives of statecraft, I argue that different ways of knowing and interacting with resources can be made possible. Significant contributions are therefore made by delineating the intersections of derisking and Indigenous communities’ economic participation in critical mineral projects, and resource diplomacy activities where bilateral partnerships support innovations to develop circular economies for critical mineral supply chains. I thus extend the value of critical approaches to statecraft, geological and economic potential, and discourses of security and responsibility as geopolitical concerns which shape how Canada positions itself as a “global supplier of choice” and a “leading mining nation” (NRCan 2022; Mines Canada 2020).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.033 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".