Skip to main content
Go to the home page of the European Commission (opens in new window)
English en
CORDIS - EU research results
CORDIS

Ecological and Decolonial Feminist Approaches to European Union Critical Raw Materials Policy

Project description

A feminist perspective on Europe’s green transition

The EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA) aims to secure access to essential minerals from resource-rich countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo. However, there lies behind it the less-apparent logics of neocolonialism and gendered power dynamics that shape the global minerals trade today. In this way, the EU-funded GenderedMinerals project offers an ecological feminist take on the CRMA. It counters the masculine rationale that explicit practical approaches to raw materials policy should take by weaving together political science with ethnography and creative storytelling. And it aims to show how corporate lobbying maintains colonial structures for its own benefit, while proposing new ideas and directions for global mineral governance that can promote equity and inclusion.

Objective

This project fills a significant gap in political ecology literature by critically assessing, through an ecological, decolonial feminist lens, the European Union’s Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA). The CRMA aims to secure and govern new and existing supply chains for the green and digital transitions. An extensive political ecology and critical development studies literature considers neocolonialism and green imperialism when it comes to Global North and EU efforts to secure mineral supplies in producer countries abroad. While gendered dynamics and a masculine ethos, I hypothesize, play a vital role when it comes to EU critical raw materials regulation and policy, the scholarly literature is sorely lacking a feminist theoretical lens and methodological approach to the CRMA’s material and symbolic dimensions. The project objective is therefore to bring an ecological feminist lens to the EU’s growing involvement in securing and governing supply chains of critical raw materials, focusing on the CRMA and its strategic partnership with the Democratic Republic of Congo. This includes examining legal developments, institutional dynamics, and views at EU level, not yet sufficiently explored. Analysis of the role of corporations in the perpetuation of patriarchal, colonial dynamics – through corporate lobbying and action at the epicenter of empire (the EU) – is a key part of this project, given corporate players’ integral involvement with CRMA development. I will creatively combine traditional research methods associated with political science and IR (such as semi-structured interviews and participation in high-level events) with ethnographic and open-ended methods such as participant observation, story-telling, non-linear narratives, and artistic expression. In this manner the project will bring foreground alternative visions of green and just transition, while allowing me to develop my conceptual and methodological skills and profile as an ecological feminist researcher.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

Keywords

Programme(s)

Topic(s)

Funding Scheme

HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships

See all projects funded under this funding scheme

Call for proposal

(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2024-PF-01

See all projects funded under this call

Coordinator

UNIVERSITEIT UTRECHT
Net EU contribution
€ 232 916,16
Address
HEIDELBERGLAAN 8
3584 CS Utrecht
Netherlands
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost
No data