1. Introduction
In a 2020 report, the World Bank announced a new initiative that it called ‘Climate-Smart Mining’.Footnote 3 The report discussed the problem that clean energy technologies use large quantities of specific minerals, often called critical minerals.Footnote 4 For this reason, securing the supply of these critical minerals for energy and battery technology has become increasingly central to government policy for many states in both the Global North and Global South.Footnote 5 This is often shorthanded as securing their supply chains. Indeed, several years later, the Bank launched a dedicated program, the Resilient and Inclusive Supply-Chain Enhancement program, to focus on energy transition supply chains.Footnote 6 In this article, I outline how these initiatives can help us to understand the stakes of contemporary development institutions’ work on the energy transition in general, and on critical mineral supply chains in particular. These initiatives entail, in my account, a form of governance that is again remaking the relationship between state, community, and corporate actors, in different ways in the Global North and Global South.Footnote 7 In my analysis, this reconfiguration is more easily understood if we read the World Bank’s work in conjunction with the IMF’s focus on macroeconomic stability amongst the energy transition, as well as part of accumulated practice stretching back at least to the 1960s US Department of Defence. My principal argument in this article is that logistics has come to form the grounds for authorizing a specific arrangement of social and legal arrangements, which we can see operating in particular ways in the energy transition. In this way, we can understand logistics as a jurisdiction, or form of governance, with significant consequences. Specifically, these consequences include how a model of energy transition that focuses on supply chain security, at least as it is envisioned by development institutions, cannot adequately grapple with questions of reparations for colonial extraction, the unequal responsibility for climate change, or reorganizing patterns of extraction, production, and distribution.
I start in Section 2 by analysing the work of the US Department of Defence’s logistics institution in the 1960s. I follow the practice of logistics in order to pay attention to how institutional legal techniques have taken shape. I argue that my analysis of this institution’s work reveals the early makings of logistics as a project to transform society to make supply chains. I then follow the institutional trajectory of the then Secretary of the Defence Department, Robert McNamara, to the World Bank. I articulate a connection between logistics and the development work carried out by the World Bank in the 1970s and 80s. Analysing development institutions helps us to connect logistics, as a technique of making supply chains, to practices of international legal ordering.
In Section 3, I analyse the World Bank’s project to secure supply pathways for critical minerals and the IMF’s work to stabilize the macro-economic effects of the transition, and suggest that these projects can show us novel forms of authority being asserted through the energy transition. I then argue that the connection between logistics and international development institutions has continued to gather pace and is shaping, in particular, the World Bank and the IMF’s work on the energy transition: logistics as a jurisdiction has continued to be influential. Specifically, and most notably, we can observe that the Bank may be again remaking what Luis Eslava and Sundhya Pahuja have identified as the meeting of the nation-state form and international development practices and institutions through the production of the ‘developmental state’.Footnote 8 Indeed, through these novel forms of authority, and in the name of secure and responsible supply of critical minerals, community voice is often further sidelined.
To conclude, I return to the question of why the form and formation of the supply chain might concern international lawyers in the context of the current transition to green energy. I suggest that without recognizing the nature and effect of the jurisdiction or practices of legal ordering that I outline, it may be harder to see the ways in which these techniques work to foreclose alternatives to the fossil fuel economy’s patterns of distribution and accumulation.Footnote 9
2. The Logistics Management Institute and the World Bank
In this section, I make two arguments. These are, firstly, that logistics can be also understood as comprising techniques that transform society to make the supply chain form, rather than only as those that speed up the transport systems of a pre-existing supply chain. This is one reason why I start my account in the 1960s rather than the 1980s or 1990s, when it is common for accounts of contemporary supply chains’ distinctive emergence to begin, if they describe supply chains as an economic effect of neoliberalism.Footnote 10 The second argument is that a particular model of logistics travelled from the US Department of Defence to the Bank with institutional practice led by Robert McNamara.Footnote 11 The article does not seek to say anything about McNamara’s subjective intentions, but rather traces the effects of his institutional projects. As Marxian scholars have reminded us, individuals do not act in a vacuum,Footnote 12 and so this article’s account of McNamara does not seek to privilege his projects over more dispersed shifts in processes and structures of capital accumulation, racialization, labour exploitation, extraction, or commodity production.Footnote 13 Rather, his institutional practice is a useful heuristic to understand specific forms of legal ordering that can shed light on the stakes and potential effects of contemporary development practice.
2.1. The Bank and transforming society for development
When Robert Strange McNamara took over the World Bank Presidency in the late 1960s, he was able to transform and rapidly expand the institution. After having significantly increased and diversified the Bank’s access to capital, McNamara was able to direct the Bank’s work away from ‘individual loans in specific types of infrastructure’ and towards ‘society-wide interventions’.Footnote 14 McNamara came to the Presidency of the World Bank from nearly a decade as US Secretary of Defence where he had become notorious for escalating the US’ involvement in the Vietnam War. He had been described as ‘an IBM machine with legs’, and as one of ‘the business world’s whiz kids who transformed corporate managerialism through a completely rationalized and numbers-based systems analysis’, both at the Pentagon and before that at Ford Motor Company with other Second World War Air Force veterans hired to modernize the car company’s organizational and planning systems.Footnote 15 This link to corporate strategy and management, including close relationships with Ford and RAND corporations, becomes very influential.Footnote 16 It is common to characterize McNamara’s Presidency at the Bank as marked by rapid expansion, or to point out that the ‘Basic Needs’ approach that McNamara championed focused on poverty as experienced by individuals. The Basic Needs approach detracted from a distributional or structural analysis, at a time when calls for reformulating international trade relations and the control and pricing of natural resources through the New International Economic Order (NIEO) were strong.Footnote 17 I suggest that we can further understand the shifts in the Bank’s work under McNamara through an analysis of logistics practices as they travel with McNamara from the Department of Defence to the Bank, and continue to shape the Bank’s contemporary work.
Indeed, one of the early public logistics institutions in the twentieth-century Global North was the US Logistics Management Institute, established in 1961 as a subsidiary body of the Department of Defence.Footnote 18 The Institute was established by McNamara, then Secretary of the Department and soon-to-be Bank President.Footnote 19 McNamara founded the Institute promising the same military outcomes as before the Institute was established, but with ‘savings of hundreds of millions of dollars’.Footnote 20 Most of the available literature and company brochures on logistics focus on the specific material aspects of transport and storage designed to decrease costs or increase profit by moving products more efficiently.Footnote 21 Therefore, we might expect records of the Logistics Management Institute held at the Baker Library at Harvard Business School’s archives to be focused on concrete infrastructural concerns too. Yet, instead, one significant part of what these records contain includes correspondence and project documentation where consultants for the Institute helped define a substantial part of its early work as focused on influencing how military contractors priced their services.Footnote 22 That is, instead of merely focusing on moving tangible objects through pre-existing legal structures to enable more rapid transport, we can understand the Institute as embarking on a far more ambitious project to transform legal relationships in society. Specifically, towards free-market pricing and, in turn, to make possible something like what we might call the beginnings of contemporary supply chains.
2.2. The Logistics Management Institute and the ‘just price’
The Department of Defence, under former Secretary McNamara, contracted Joel Dean Associates to develop a profit incentive system for companies that produced military products.Footnote 23 Dean’s project was partially developed in order to justify military spending to the public in the context of Cold War tensions and an increasing US military presence in Vietnam.Footnote 24 For this reason, the project was labelled top secret.Footnote 25 However, the project also comprised an explicitly articulated political project to set up and expand a particular form of free-market society. In particular, Dean wanted to focus on increasing ‘in the supply sector in which Defense needs are now met through negotiated contracts the same economic forces that contribute to business efficiency in the competitive civilian sector’.Footnote 26 Indeed, Dean was a professor at the University of Chicago who was centrally involved in developing the disciplinary thought of mid-to-late twentieth-century corporate finance and management economics.Footnote 27 Dean was aware of tensions between satisfying the public and creating the free market approach to profits that he saw as desirable. He wrote in a section of a draft report entitled ‘Conflict in requirements can be minimized’ that ‘satisfying the public makes the use of free-market pricing difficult’.Footnote 28 In his analysis, resolving the issue had a clear solution, namely ‘the immediate problem is thus to devise a pricing method which will 1. have as many merits of free market pricing as possible (even where subject to surveillance) and 2. help to narrow the area in which surveillance will continue’.Footnote 29
In Dean’s view, processes of public accountability got in the way of economic efficiency. He wrote, ‘the enemy is the general accounting office, the arm of the Congress, and the latest exponent of the just price’,Footnote 30 as ‘procurement regulations are now far too detailed and the despotism of the G.A.O, which is a tool of Congress and which tends to blackmail the services, must be curbed’.Footnote 31 The fact that Dean had positioned the project as against regulation by Congress can be understood less as escaping legal oversight and more as inaugurating legal arrangements that would facilitate a certain version of logistics practices. Dean indeed framed the potential ‘contribution’ of the firm’s project as ‘to try to persuade the Defense Department that the private enterprise economic system can be sold to the U.S. Congress, despite all previous indications to the contrary’.Footnote 32
Unpacking these elements of early logistics work in the supply sector can thus highlight how logistics as an idea does not only set out to make transport more efficient. It is also aimed at expanding or re-constituting a particular form of free-market society and, at a certain moment in time, was defined against calls for organizing sectors of the economy around the notion of the ‘just price’.Footnote 33 Even more importantly for this article’s analysis, we can see that the Logistics Management Institute’s model of logistics work was not separate from creating the conditions that make certain supply chains. It did not envisage approaching a fully formed supply chain in order to speed up its transport systems. Indeed, transport technology could clearly not on its own create shifts in Congress’ public accounting processes. This model of logistics thus also sought to remake society in a much more profound way to enable the subordination of multiple competing objectives so that elements of contemporary supply chains such as rapid transport and higher profits seem conceivable and take shape in practice.Footnote 34 Such a remaking involved much more widespread work that included many public institutions and private actors, and is well beyond a constrained account of inventory management, supply routes, or delivery schedules. We can see that, in this way, legal, social, and economic relationships within society must be remade in order for logistics projects, or even modes of thinking, to make sense and to take effect.
2.3. The Bank’s evolving logistics practices
On one reading, we could observe a temporal delay between McNamara’s Presidency, which ends in the early 1980s, and the Bank’s most explicit uptake of logistics work as evidenced by its Logistics Performance Index (LPI), with the first data set produced in 2007. The LPI is part of the World Bank’s contemporary logistics practice facilitating the operation of global supply chains. Indeed, the 2023 data reporting for the LPI includes a section on ‘supply chain tracking data’.Footnote 35 The LPI is a hierarchically organized scorecard of how quickly each nation-state facilitates the trade and transport of commodities through its borders.Footnote 36 Through the LPI, states’ logistics ‘performance’ is measured according to metrics of trade liberalization and supply chain product delivery schedules. This public ranking, accessible to investors and corporations, creates social conditions where states – particularly states in the Global South – are encouraged or disciplined to transform themselves in light of the promise of reaching a point in the supply chain where a greater share of the profit margins will purportedly accrue.Footnote 37 The efficacy of such mechanisms is underscored by the Bank’s role in producing knowledge about international development that has come to almost surpass its loans practice.Footnote 38 Indeed the Bank’s self-description of its ‘knowledge products’,Footnote 39 or operation as a ‘knowledge bank’ recognizes this influence.Footnote 40 Dimitri Van Den Meerssche highlights how over time the Bank has continued to be ‘a highly productive site for the production, circulation, translation and application of substantive ideals on international legal ordering, liberal state formation and global governance’.Footnote 41 As we will see later, the Bank’s contemporary work in development knowledge production is central to its role in defining desirable pathways for the energy transition. However, this influence does not come from nowhere, and it builds on decades of institutional expansion and increasing development programming conducted during the years of McNamara’s Presidency. In this way, we could say that the Bank’s institutional practice transforming society for development enables its uptake and regeneration of logistics’ work as an authorizing narrative, well before the LPI’s official publication.
But searching in the Bank’s archives, it is possible to find technical papers on shipping and logistics from the 1980s,Footnote 42 and projects for transport corridors or port developments through the 1970s.Footnote 43 More documents with titles such as ‘Trade and transport logistics facilitation guidelines’ or ‘India – Transport Container Logistics Project’ appear in the 1990s.Footnote 44 Here, we can recognize close links between logistics and the Bank’s work during McNamara’s Presidency between 1968 and 1981. Specifically, the Bank’s work reorganizing development lending, interventions, and advice to facilitate large-scale, export-oriented agricultural practices, as well as enabling much larger loans that connected many points of globalized capital, maps quite closely onto both the material and financial infrastructures of contemporary supply chains. Moreover, logistics’ guiding mantra of efficiency is close to how McNamara reportedly described the Bank’s extant work upon his arrival, as currently ‘an inefficient way to run a planet’.Footnote 45
The Bank’s projects through the 1970s, for instance, remade sectors of agricultural production, affecting property relations to vast tracts of land. It formed relations of contract and debt between states in the South and webs of private investors that enabled IMF’s structural adjustment programs in the 1980s immense decision-making authority about what could be done with public funds. Community life and public services were highly disrupted in many places during this time, but pathways for commodity trade increased.Footnote 46 In this picture, juridical forms including contracts, treaties, property rights, and resource concessions were everywhere.Footnote 47 But beyond this, to see how logistics and the form of the supply chain connect to governance and practices of international ordering, we can turn to an analysis of developmental authority and jurisdictional technique. Efficiency, or the purportedly seamless transportation of commodities, came to be sufficiently prominent to authorize development advice and intervention to reorder state practice accordingly.
The effects of operationalizing this expansive development agenda have been well documented. This includes reshaping agricultural production towards export that diminished community access to land, and increasing dollarized debt during a time of commodity price slumps and sharp rises in interest rates that culminated in far-reaching debt crises.Footnote 48 Indeed, Goldman highlights that ‘despite its deep-seated entanglement in the roots of the debt crisis, the Bank emerged from the era, quite unexpectedly, as the newly anointed global arbiter of debt relations between the North and the South’.Footnote 49 Many accounts of structural adjustment policies administered in response to this growing debt have shown the devastating impact of debt crisis management by the Bank, the IMF and several North Atlantic state actors on publics in the South.Footnote 50 Throughout the 1980s, many Southern states were required to privatize public sectors even as Northern banks were bailed out by the Bretton Woods Institutions.Footnote 51 Indeed, some states’ entire income from exports was required to be used to service debt repayments.Footnote 52 While these debt crises had complex causes, the global circulation of goods was central to many of the liberalizing projects that both preceded them and were used to respond to them.Footnote 53 Yet clearly transport technologies alone could not have created effects at this scale. This article’s account of logistics, as an integral part of these significant institutional projects, is thus broader than enabling rapid transport. Rather, it includes the authorization and operationalization of legal, social, and economic relationships that have made global commodity supply chains, with very substantial consequences.Footnote 54
To be clear, my argument does not seek to attribute intention or over-determined causal links to individual actors, or to conflate globalized production in general with specific forms of logistics.Footnote 55 Rather, the article focuses on following legal practices and institutional forms, and how logistics transformed from a peripheral aspect of development practice that focused more generally on globalizing extraction and production, or creating new markets, to meriting its own particular index and global data set. Indeed, broader transnational processes and shifts in the international order such as late Cold War responses to anticolonial legal movements enabled these legal practices and institutional forms to take effect.Footnote 56 Contemporarily, development institutions shape many of the constituent parts of the legal infrastructure of being able to move commodities from one place to another, including trade agreements and labour law. Much of this operationalization has occurred through the adjacent development institution, the IMF. IMF loan conditions have, since the 1980s and 90s, required recipient states for development finance to enact regulatory conditions that prioritize and protect foreign investment and the globalized circulation of capital and commodities. This has brought private actors into increasingly influential positions.Footnote 57 As Goldman points out, ‘to win support for his interventionist and expansive development agenda, McNamara needed to sell it as rational, politically and economically necessary, and profitable’.Footnote 58
It is in this way that we can understand logistics as becoming an integral part of international institutions and developmental authority. Shifts in practice around commodity pricing, trade, and transport did not happen without legal techniques and institutional initiatives. Nor did these shifts occur without a way of conceiving of commodity supply that is linked to gaining or maintaining authority over the spaces or products of the supply chain. We could also call this logistics, because shifts in the international legal and economic order that made what we now call supply chains were not born from randomized configurations of international authority. Undoubtably Dean’s project at the LMI was a political project, but it was also a juridical one, and required this model of logistics taking on juridical form in order to take shape in practice. Similarly, at an international scale, my argument is that logistics has taken on the quality of a jurisdiction, slowly coming to function by authorizing particular interventions, through its connection with developmental institutional practice.Footnote 59 The Bank announced the LPI in the 2000s as if it was self-evident by that point in time that logistics had virtue and utility.
It has become commonplace in developmental thought to assume that struggles between rival ways of organizing legal forms and relationships of development are not struggles over law or legal authority at all, but rather social, political, or economic facts.Footnote 60 As Pahuja has observed, paying attention to jurisdiction ‘encourages us to reflect on the way international law as it is usually practiced, performed, written about and critiqued, suppresses the lawful quality of these meetings’.Footnote 61 Importantly, ‘the concept of development is crucial in this suppression’, that ‘encourages us to think of the world as already made before law – and we – arrive’.Footnote 62 In this project, however, I join many others who have resisted adopting an often-implicit narrative about development that since the end of the Cold War the appropriate way to arrange legal relationships of development has been settled, rather than subject to ongoing contestation.Footnote 63 The widespread adoption of these narratives by many international lawyers has enabled the Bank to cease justifying its work in terms of part of a legal struggle or intervention, but simply as benevolent fact. That is, to assume its position without acknowledging the contested context of its authority.
Yet, following legal scholars who pay attention to international legal practices and techniques can help us to understand how logistics becomes a form of governance or ordering. As McVeigh and Pahuja have argued, this can be characterized in terms of ‘what we might think of as a practical sovereignty that ties jurisdiction over a subject matter to a specific institution. It gains its authority from a universal account of the economic form of the international’.Footnote 64 Indeed, my account of the Department of Defence’s early work does not seek to imply that logistics is wedded to a peculiarly 1960s North American political economy or military expansion. Or, for that matter, that it can explain everything about the Bank’s work in divergent sectors through the 1970s. Rather, my argument is that the LMI’s institutional practice helps us to see how logistics involves transforming legal and social relationships. As such, we could say that a particular model of logistics was reproduced or regenerated through developmental institutional practice during this time, when the supply chain started to have a strong connection to the international legal order. This model of logistics has of course shifted in the decades since, with emerging qualities that I examine in the next section, and other rival practices have also emerged.Footnote 65 Within the context of the energy transition, the next section analyses the Bank and the IMF’s current projects and highlights novel forms of authority being asserted, in part through logistics and the supply chain form.Footnote 66
3. International financial institutions and logistics in the energy transition
When Joel Dean contributed to inaugurating the discipline of management economics, it was not yet clear what the role that economic thought or consulting businesses would play in either supply chains, logistics, or the energy transition. Yet today, consultants are offering their economic expertise to guide state responses to climate change.Footnote 67 I have been arguing thus far that what is involved or at stake in this practice is more than economic advice, but forms of legal ordering or jurisdiction.
In this section, I make the argument that the connection between practices and knowledge of logistics and development has been intensifying, with consequences for how we understand the work of development institutions in the energy transition. I investigate whether increased developmental and institutional attention to critical mineral supply chains is an exercise in making them more efficient, reliable, or responsible, as the Bank would have it. Or whether it carries more significant implications and effects for the rearrangement and consolidation of hierarchies and practices of international ordering, as is my argument. Further, whether the IMF’s programme of macro-economic interventions stabilizes and facilitates decarbonizing, as is the IMF’s account. Or, whether explicit plans for investor protection and structural adjustment do not ‘de-risk’ decarbonizing; rather, they shift risk to the peripheries of financial capital already burdened by practices of extraction, production, and waste disposal. In this section, therefore, I first characterize the Bank’s work as shaping supply chains for critical minerals in novel and emerging ways. That is, as somewhat in line with overlaying securitization onto energy supply as is being enacted by many North Atlantic state actors, but also as re-formulating the developmental state. As we will see later in the section, the IMF’s work less explicitly adopts this emergent supply chain form, but can be read as ensuring the operationalization of new supply pathways through recourse to fiscal intervention in states with mineral revenue, and towards a vision of macroeconomic continuity that prioritizes the stable market position of private actors.
3.1. The Bank and securing critical mineral supply
In 2020, the World Bank published a report entitled ‘Minerals for Climate Action: The Mineral Intensity of the Clean Energy Transition’.Footnote 68 The report’s stated purpose is to provide advice to certain state bodies and private actors to assist their, in the Bank’s words, ‘quest to help resource-rich developing countries sustainably and responsibly produce the minerals needed to deliver on SDGs 7 and 13’.Footnote 69 The Bank prescribes a specific form for how states from the Global South with critical mineral reserves can be ‘major contributors to the clean energy future’.Footnote 70 That is, ‘by producing a significant part of these strategic minerals and supplying them to the global market’.Footnote 71 While the Bank’s report presents this process as streamlined and contained, supplying minerals to the global market, or a supply chain, requires significant work across multiple contested domains. The Bank’s policy advice and influential knowledge production are mediated and authorized through existing development concepts and practices. As Donatella Alessandrini and Jeremmy Okonjo highlight, ‘for [international economic institutions], global value chains herald a “new dawn” for development’.Footnote 72
A primary technique for making emerging critical mineral supply chains functional in the Bank’s report is its Climate-Smart Mining Initiative. The Bank’s 2020 report explains, ‘these countries [the “developing” states with relevant resource reserves mentioned above] will need good governance, knowledge, capacity and strategy. They will need Climate-Smart Mining’.Footnote 73 In the Bank’s description, Climate-Smart Mining functions by:
working together with governments, development partners, industries, and civil society to minimize the new emissions from a low-carbon transition and work closely with resource-rich developing countries to responsibly supply these strategic minerals for clean energy technologies.Footnote 74
We might inquire into who has authority to decide which minerals are strategic, how to extract them, and what ‘responsibly supplying’ means: that is, what is able to be challenged and what cannot be changed. It is worth observing that the Bank is framing the energy transition in a particular way: with a particular guiding model and assumptions that undergird it. The Bank acknowledges that extracting high quantities of strategic minerals from the Global South could cause social backlash.Footnote 75 However, we can see that the activity of supplying minerals from the South to an already-existing transnational energy market through pre-existing supply and value chains and modes of transportation appears as an assumed background fact to the work of the Bank’s approach to the energy transition. This is true even while a form of securitization overlays and reformulates aspects of these supply practices. Yet if we step back from the question of the energy transition for a moment, the transnational energy market and its volatile supply chains are not neutral processes. If the Bank’s stated goals are climate action and affordable energy, it is at least contestable to assume that the transnational energy market and its web of competing corporate actors will deliver these goals.Footnote 76 While there appears to be a certain element of promoting the powering of purportedly more efficient mineral extraction with renewable energy proposed through the Climate-Smart Mining Initiative, its core focus returns to the supply of these strategic materials needed for energy transition technology. In other words, the ‘quest’ mentioned above can be understood as enabling the extraction of minerals from territories in the South, so that states with high energy consumption or high emissions outputs can decarbonize parts of their economies with a secure supply of energy generating mineral inputs. The promise of economic development for states in the South authorizes this process in both continuous and novel ways.Footnote 77
Indeed, energy transition or critical mineral supply chains are different in substantial ways to other forms of supply chains, and they are still being contested and made by practices such as ‘onshoring’ rather than only ‘offshoring’, employed by states in the Global North with aims of rival forms of energy security rather than only efficiency.Footnote 78 Thea Riofrancos explains how moves towards ‘onshoring’ comprise a public–private alliance beset by tensions and directed toward supply security, ‘an interlocking set of policies and justifications that promote lithium [and other minerals deemed critical to the transition] extraction and emphasize the environmental credentials of Global North mining’.Footnote 79 ‘Friend-shoring’ is a related practice, where control of the supply chain is purported to be secured by relocating extraction and production to the territories of political allies.Footnote 80 However, we do not have to think of practices of economic security as historically sequenced before or after a time of liberalization and efficiency imperatives, but rather as able to operate in differing degrees of prominence and interact with adjacent modes of authority in particular ways at different moments in time.Footnote 81
It is therefore, at best, unclear whether or not these security-oriented supply chain practices are experienced by many communities as an increase in authority to define the mode of their participation compared with existing market-oriented supply chain practices. But notably, the much-contested question of a ‘social licence’ that a company (on paper) requires before commencing mining operations has disappeared from the Bank’s influential knowledge production on what responsible supply of energy transition minerals means. Even if the community-level social licence is replaced by a more amorphous and internationalized public that benefits from decarbonizing, the Bank’s report gives little indication that such benefits would be evenly distributed.Footnote 82 The processes of authorization and decision-making about mining operations were also, as many scholars have shown, not substantively located with communities as much as discursively.Footnote 83 Many communities were brought into closer contact with development institutions through ideas of decentralization, with dispossessive rather than emancipatory effects.Footnote 84 Indeed, it is unclear what practices could be enabled by the imperative for a state to produce significant quantities of energy transition minerals such as lithium, and whether community-level input may be further sidelined in the process. Ostensibly, the imperative is for such production to be responsible, but there are competing imperatives for production to be rapidly scaled up, if demand for products such as up-to-date vehicles for wealthy individuals keeps growing.
We can therefore begin to observe novel forms of authorization emerging through the Bank’s practice. Without being definitive about the future effects of this specific report and the Bank’s many other projects and publications, we can make several observations.Footnote 85 Specifically, and most notably, we can observe that the Bank may be again promoting the remaking of what Eslava and Pahuja have identified as the meeting of the nation-state form and international development practices and institutions through the production of the ‘developmental state’.Footnote 86 Rather than clearly a model of the industrializing old developmental state or the decentralized new developmental state, part of the peculiar nature of, in the Bank’s words, the ‘resource-rich developing state’ is that the domain of the ‘local’ appears to disappear entirely. This is true even as the appeal to decarbonization which justifies the extraction is often carried out in the name of suffering precisely at this community level.Footnote 87 Indeed, it seems as though the Bank’s vision of such a ‘resource-rich developing state’ includes elements from both of these previous models – the centralization that disciplined dissident sections of the population with the privatization of the economy and the openness to and protection for private investors.
The discursive and practical authority of development further functions in the Bank’s report to make states in the South accountable for the responsible quality of transition mineral extraction and supply, despite social conflicts being common to mining operations.Footnote 88 A discourse of development figures in the Bank’s report to authorize and legitimize the increased mineral extraction from communities in the South by promising state and corporate actors economic growth through the vehicle of the supply chain, and the possibility of ‘moving up’ it. The Bank’s widespread and longstanding policy promise of facilitating the supply chain is eventual growth in access to the financial gain produced along it. This promise often conflates the interests of communities living near mineral reserves and state and corporate actors who may stand to be involved in extraction at a more substantial scale.Footnote 89 We will also see in the next section how the IMF plans to stabilize the macro-economy or discipline the effects of any substantial income from mining critical minerals. In the context of the shifting and securitized supply chains in the context of the energy transition, the Bank also points to significant opportunities for economic growth arising from increased mineral extraction of transition minerals.Footnote 90 But examining this promise more closely, scholars have shown us that the operation of the supply chain rarely rewards communities for state-level efforts at structural change or growing indebtedness to participate more efficiently in the global market with much economic gain. Such economic gain primarily accrues to a small number of, often private, actors, even if they are facilitated by North Atlantic state projects of energy security.Footnote 91 Economic growth has commonly been the stated imperative for a range of international interventions and structural changes in the South.Footnote 92 Although the promise of economic gain authorizes supply chains into an integral part of international institutions’ work, they are often unstable and highly dispossessive.Footnote 93 Such misnomers as ‘quickly’ and ‘easily’ facilitating the passage of products and commodities through borders obscure the slow and burdensome work that many people carry out to facilitate that complex movement of substances and allow it to appear as efficient.Footnote 94
We can also identify varied but significant continuities between contemporary supply chains and colonial resource supply.Footnote 95 As Perrone argues, ‘the most important laws and institutions for the capitalist industrialization of Western countries were not those of private property, contracts, or free trade, as it is often claimed, but those related to colonial long-distance trade’.Footnote 96 And as we can see, significant work by international actors or institutions is needed to contribute to an arrangement of commodity supply geared toward either efficiency or security, which might suggest that we need not take it for granted. As M. Sornarajah has pointed to, historically ‘the seeking of justifications for foreign investment, the protection of it through force, the acquisition of colonies where resources could be exploited and markets could be established for finished products … was the project that necessitated the creation of international law’.Footnote 97
While mediated through existing practices and concepts of development, we have seen how contemporary energy transition critical mineral supply chains being made are different in significant ways from previous supply chain practices.Footnote 98 We can observe the ways in which logistics is not permanent and, even though its practices are resilient, at points they can be fragile and subject to change and contestation.Footnote 99 Even within the same institutional forms, new logistics techniques are constantly required. Some of these contemporary new techniques include the Bank’s work supporting development actors to put into practice ‘responsible supply’ of large quantities critical minerals from the South. That is, contributing to making states into the compliant ‘friends’ on which Northern practices of ‘friendshoring’ rely. The reference back to familiar development concepts both authorizes the making of these new supply chain practices, and their naturalization into a set of economic facts that are harder to contest. Because despite the supply chain’s naturalization, substantial work goes into creating it, as can be seen through examining these two instances of institutional practice.
Logistics’ drive to either efficiency or security recasts competing attachments to places, resources, and community life as in service to the turbulent and often dispossessive circulation of contemporary global production.Footnote 100 Yet, as I pointed to earlier, it has become commonplace in developmental thought to assume that struggles between competing ways of organizing legal forms and relationships of development are not struggles over international legal and institutional authority at all, but rather social, political, or economic facts.Footnote 101 The widespread adoption of these narratives has enabled the Bank to cease justifying its work in terms of part of a legal struggle or intervention, but simply as accepted practice. However, my argument so far has been that logistics as a jurisdiction is connected to international institutions and developmental authority, and that we should analyse the work of the Bank and the IMF in this light. That is, we can begin to see how the supply chain may have become a jurisdiction, and how, in this jurisdiction, governing occurs through the form of (critical mineral) supply chains rather than through traditional legal categories of government.
This analysis of the Bank’s work on the energy transition might also, therefore, contribute to layering a form of institutional authority that obscures community-level voice or participation onto existing forms of developmental practice and relations between varied state, corporate, community, and international institutional actors. The next section extends this account by analysing the IMF’s related practice in operationalizing emergent logics and practices of ‘de-risking’, where the state form is mobilized towards obligations further away from the domain of the local towards guaranteeing private investment.
3.2. The IMF and ‘de-risking’ for macroeconomic stability
This section examines the IMF’s work that has the stated purpose of stabilizing the macroeconomic effects of the energy transition. I provide an account of the IMF’s plans for investor protection and structural adjustment as part of emerging policies of ‘de-risking’, or requiring public guarantees for private finance directed towards the energy transition. However, such practices do not, in a straightforward sense, remove risk or volatility from the emergent energy transition, but rather shift the risk to the peripheries of financial capital already burdened by practices of extraction, production, and waste disposal.Footnote 102 The IMF’s work in this area can thus be understood as ensuring the operationalization of the new supply pathways that we saw in the Bank’s work. Specifically, through recourse to fiscal intervention in states with mineral revenue, to ensure macroeconomic stability or continuity for private actors, even as the IMF has slowly started to embrace certain departures from its previous orthodoxy in the way it discusses green industrial policy.Footnote 103
The IMF’s working paper ‘Energy Transition Metals’ puts forward an argument about the macroeconomic consequences of the energy transition, in particular about the market price of key critical minerals. Authors Lukas Boer, Andrea Pescatori, and Martin Stuermer express concern about the potential for widespread inflation if critical mineral extraction fails to be conducted rapidly enough for the current market structure, especially if people protest the extraction.Footnote 104 In this account, easing potential economic impacts of decarbonizing requires extracting more minerals, after their prices rise. That is, increasing the supply, not decreasing the demand for individual vehicle batteries or allowing different models of pricing, which is inevitably a distributive question.Footnote 105 Indeed, the authors observe that supply ‘elasticity’ – how quickly increased quantities of critical minerals can be supplied to meet increasing demand, shown by ‘price signals’ or increasing prices – varies amongst lithium, copper, and cobalt due to different levels of capital-intensive mining infrastructure.Footnote 106 As Boer, Pescatori, and Stuermer present it, this is a neutral statement about mining technology and what it takes to organize metal extraction. However, looking more closely we can see that there are significant assumptions about the legal and political form of the energy transition embedded within it. The approach specifically retains the role of market actors controlling and profiting from extraction, and it organizes energy production around the timeframes best suited to financial capitalism.
The report’s policy implications and recommendations further posit private investment as a key lever in driving energy policy, affecting market pricing in a manner not subject to forms of public deliberation. Social and environmental concerns can only enter the picture through financially ‘incentivizing’ firms to consider these.Footnote 107 Moreover, Boer, Pescatori, and Stuermer directly foreshadow ‘fiscal or structural policy interventions’ to discipline ‘countries benefiting from large windfalls’, rather than, for instance, adjusting international monetary and debt arrangements that cause economic hardship to mineral-importing countries when prices rise.Footnote 108 In an adjacent report, the IMF builds on its policy commitment to financial intervention, writing that it can ‘mitigate macroeconomic risk [caused by the energy transition] by providing advice through bilateral and multilateral surveillance’ and ‘assessing countries’ economic and financial developments’.Footnote 109 We can see the extent of the intervention contemplated when the IMF writes,
Countries, particularly eligible and qualifying emerging market and developing economies, with limited fiscal space can benefit from IMF Resilience and Sustainability Trust (RST) financing. This new financing facility focuses on longer-term structural changes … The RST could play a catalytic role by helping develop a conducive investment climate through reforms that improve the regulatory environment and enhance the quality of data and disclosures, as well as support policies.Footnote 110
Scholars of debt and development have shown us the significantly asymmetrical effects that previous IMF interventions to implement long-term structural change or improve the regulatory environment in support of investors have had in the past, particularly during the debt crises of the 1980s and resulting social unrest.Footnote 111 As Alessandrini and Okonjo explain, ‘the IMF and the Bank required developing states which needed to reschedule their debt to abide by the powerful conditionalities of [structural adjustment programs] which instilled deregulation, privatisation, liberalisation and, importantly in terms of disciplining populations, the reduction of public spending, thereby radically transforming the policy options of developing countries’.Footnote 112 Contemporary practices will not, of course, have exactly the same effects as past institutional practice, especially as securitization gains prominence as a competing objective. But as we will see further, we can learn from them the extent of the IMF’s influence.
Contemporarily, a growing response to financing the emerging supply pathways and forms of energy generation, distribution, and access has been termed ‘de-risking’.Footnote 113 This term generally refers to securing private investment with public guarantees, based on forms of economic analysis that prioritize organizing political and financial relationships by incentivizing corporate actors and protecting their capital. Growing volatility in financial markets in general times has increased, as Alessandrini and Okonjo point to, forms of a ‘“de-risking” logic embedded in the mechanics of incentivising private capital’.Footnote 114 Their analysis highlights how this logic results in ‘the “over-financialization of the periphery,” [which] inordinately shifts risks to the developing state and vulnerable, “underdeveloped” communities’.Footnote 115 Also at stake in de-risking is contributing to a long-standing pattern that casts the Global South’s regulation of corporations as ‘hindering economic development’,Footnote 116 or potentially also hindering the energy transition. Indeed, Yannis Dafermos, Daniela Gabor, and Jo Michell point out that de-risking threatens the ‘financial position of national governments in the Global South and creates profitability opportunities for institutional investors and wealthy individuals in countries that have the key responsibility for the climate crisis’.Footnote 117 Indeed, many green finance instruments, initiated by the EU and the World Bank since around 2008, fund the extraction of critical minerals for energy transition infrastructure.Footnote 118 Yet as Godwin Dzah observes, ‘this new wave of extraction is happening against the background of historical ecological debt owed the South by the North’.Footnote 119
We can further understand contemporary de-risking as part of a longer set of institutional practices and techniques. Indeed, the IMF has long concerned itself with macroeconomic stability amongst North Atlantic actors, at the expense of other regions. In its early days, a key domain of the initial struggle to set up the Bretton Woods Institutions was the British Empire’s internal trade preferencing policies.Footnote 120 Coming out of a wartime period where military strategic objectives dominated economic planning, a critical concern for Britain in the negotiations was how to approach an era of renewed free trade while balancing monetary and exchange rate stabilization and demands from growing democratic pressures and labour power for state welfare.Footnote 121 While Britain wanted to retain a sterling-centric monetary order,Footnote 122 US financial might enabled it to insist on a commitment to free trade integration and equal access to trade with the British Empire.Footnote 123 Indeed, accepting US assistance in military provisioning would require reformulating British imperial economics and in turn accepting diminished global dominance in trade.Footnote 124 Gesturing to how development has often functioned to suppress contestation at times of upheaval, Jamie Martin writes that ‘the reality of unrivaled US power in the 1940s meant that the United Kingdom itself could no longer assume that it would enjoy the degree of insulation to which it was accustomed’.Footnote 125
This longer account of institutional practice can shape our understanding of the IMF’s current work on the energy transition in two ways. First, it places the IMF’s focus on macro-economic relationships and the Bank’s focus on specific projects and development advice together as part of larger struggles over the international legal and economic order. Secondly, it connects the IMF’s work on macroeconomic stability and the continuity of private investors’ role in the global economy to logistics practices of transforming the political economy of social and legal relationships.
The IMF’s practices operate in a substantially different manner to those of the Bank, but we can trace in its techniques links to the logics at play in Joel Dean’s work for the Logistics Management Institute. That is, these practices also join a particular inheritance of logistics techniques of remaking provisioning activities through reinforcing the mechanism of market price signals that are part of the broader financial and legal infrastructure required for supply chains to be made. As Cold War practices made clear, one crucial way to ensure friends for ‘friendshoring’ remain friendly is through financing or loan practices that have conditions that can be enforced if required.Footnote 126 Taking these close readings of two institutional projects together can highlight how both the Bank and the IMF’s work have shifted multiple times in response to periods of change in international law. Indeed, they were created to reformulate existing hierarchies in a time of post-war upheaval and formal decolonization. Through shifting institutional practice, they have repeated this move at least once more during the upheavals in commodity and energy prices, debt crises, and demands for radical change of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. At the time, the institutions contributed to bringing into being an international legal order organized around the authority of liberalization and private finance. Now, company-state-society-international relations are again starting to be reconfigured with new roles for the unfolding energy transition. But without seeing international institutions as being to some extent involved with these historical and novel logistics techniques, it may be harder for international lawyers concerned about decarbonization and the energy transition to appreciate the ways in which the refiguration is occurring.
Indeed, an analysis that takes logistics for granted could obscure these emergent social and legal relationships where practices of extraction and distribution of critical minerals are being overlaid with security and de-risking measures, and are perhaps even reformulating the developmental state. Destabilizing an account of logistics as more than supply chain management and administration, and accounting for its connection to international legal and financial institutions, can point us toward novel forms of authority being produced at this nexus and contribute to understanding the possible trajectories of the emergent energy transition, and perhaps our role within it. Specifically, how such de-risking practices may reformulate the developmental state in a manner that has tenors of both centralization and privatization. Global governance through development has previously had several aims, including (uneven and unequal) economic growth, security (or reducing some level of poverty to prevent the spread of communism), and some version of spreading very particular Western legal and institutional forms both along ‘civilisational’ lines and to protect imperial assets.Footnote 127 Global governance through development and, perhaps, the supply chain form in the energy transition has a strikingly simple aim: obtaining critical minerals without too much disruption. Of course, acquiring resources has a long history, but as many have argued, ‘the making of the world of international law is an ongoing activity which depends on particular kinds of practices – “technical” practices – for its continuation’.Footnote 128 In order for many of the structures and uneven rewards of international law to be available into the future, they must be remade in ways that are at least ostensibly freed from carbon-based fuel, but perhaps not from the other myriad practices and inequalities of the fossil fuel economy.
This takes on a particular gravity if we understand logistics as forming, in some ways, a jurisdiction. That is, a jurisdiction that is not only organized around authorizing critical mineral extraction, but also authorizing state practice and financial mechanisms of the energy transition. Practices of extraction can be, in rare moments, more obviously contestable. Even if claims to state sovereignty over resources have been so thoroughly mediated through development’s rendering of ‘investment’ to be primarily effectively subordinated to private actors’ claims, community-level claims remain at least marginally visible if the question asked is ownership or consent to extract. But a jurisdiction organized around a purpose – the energy transition – rather than a substance – for instance, lithium – is organized differently.Footnote 129 If the source of this jurisdiction’s authority is grounded in purposes, rather than in a substance, its authority becomes more internationalized. This internationalization is not solidaristic or democratic, however. If the energy transition is the source of this jurisdiction’s authority, it too becomes an incontestable fact rather than one form of decarbonizing that could come into being in many, highly divergent and highly contested ways. The way such a purpose grounds authority within the energy transition recasts developmental states, or at least those states that have claims to critical minerals, as part of an essential international process, but not one that they have control over shaping. To summarize the article’s argument in this way, the authority of development as a mode of legal thought obscures the effects of logistics and the form of the supply chain in the energy transition, in effect rendering less visible forms of decarbonization that do not seek to reproduce patterns of accumulation and distribution so inherent to the fossil fuel economy.
4. Conclusion
This article has connected several parts of institutional practice over time, heuristically joined through the work of Robert McNamara at the Logistics Management Institute and then at the World Bank. Methodologically, this move has been intended less to account for McNamara’s individual influence to be an exercise in drawing out a certain model of logistics as more constitutive and expansive than simply transport technology. Indeed, the Bank was a key institutional driver of operationalizing the new developmental state in the wake of struggles to re-form international trade and finance relations: this was central to forming the social and legal relations necessary for what we think of as critical mineral supply chains in the context of the energy transition to take shape amidst mobilizations of North Atlantic state and corporate authority.
In articulating how the Bank regenerated a form of logistics in its developmental visions and projects, I focused on institutional practice, which enabled me to draw out logistics as a form of governance or jurisdiction. Rather than taking the Bank or the IMF’s accounts of their work for granted, as expertise guiding the supply of critical minerals or macro-economic stability within a pre-constituted energy transition made up of social and economic facts, investigating logistics can show how the international legal order has been authorized. This includes the reformulation of the developmental state. Specifically, by obscuring community-level claims and promoting the securitization of supply pathways for ‘critical minerals’, and towards ‘de-risking’, or providing public guarantees for private finance and macroeconomic structures amongst potential flux from the energy transition. Being mediated through existing development concepts and drawing on many decades of institutional practice has, in some ways, made the Bank and the IMF’s interventions more easily able to be framed as economic facts. That is, as harder to contest than if they were conceived as contested consolidations and shifts in legal authority, in many instances further away from community and public deliberation despite the rhetoric of partnerships that accompanies official initiatives. In a more granular way, examining the Bank’s work revealed the potential for what it called the ‘resource-rich developing state’ reformulating the developmental state in novel ways. These included elements of centralization that disciplined dissident sections of the population from the old developmental state (without the industrialization), with the privatization of the economy and the openness to and protection for private investors from the new developmental state (without the discourse of local decision-making). This joins in uneasy ways with moves from North Atlantic state actors to secure supply chain pathways for critical minerals for energy transition technologies. Reformulating the developmental state is also further operationalized, on a larger structural level, by the IMF’s projects of ‘de-risking’ or intervening in public budget structures in order to ensure macroeconomic stability and continuity, at least for private investors. Many green finance instruments, thus de-risked by public guarantee to the private investor, in fact shift risk to the already overburdened peripheries of intersecting processes of financial capitalism, racialization, extraction, ecological destruction, over-production, accumulation, and maldistribution that saturate social and legal life in many places. This is why the question of why the form and formation of the supply chain might concern us as international lawyers. If logistics comprises, as I have suggested, close connections to these forms of international legal institutional authority and practice, then interventions to remake the energy transition might look to reparative or solidaristic possibilities, beyond the supply chain form.
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