Research programme
Nine research verticals in three clusters, each pairing an open academic question with a public evidence base: the rules and rents of extraction, mineral security and statecraft, and the people and places that host mining.
The legal and institutional architecture of mineral governance.
What legal and institutional architectures best reconcile investor certainty, state sovereignty and the public interest in minerals?
RV-02How mineral rents are created, captured and shared.
How should mineral fiscal instruments be designed to capture rents efficiently across price cycles without deterring investment?
RV-03Governance ahead of extraction at the mineral frontier.
What governance should precede extraction at the mineral frontier, and who should share in its benefits?
Supply security and mineral poverty, measured together.
How can states secure mineral supply while securing equitable development from extraction, and what is lost when only one dimension is measured?
RV-05Criticality assessment and the governance of strategic reserves.
Which criticality and reserve architectures best insure economies against mineral supply shocks, and at what cost?
RV-06From mineral endowment to negotiating leverage.
Under what conditions does mineral endowment or processing position translate into durable diplomatic leverage?
Standards, closure and the accountability of extraction.
Which standards and assurance mechanisms actually change mining practice on the ground, from consent to closure?
RV-08Rights, safety and livelihoods for the world's largest mining workforce.
How can formalisation deliver rights and safety for artisanal miners without destroying the livelihoods it aims to protect?
RV-09Recycling, reprocessing and the limits of substitution for primary supply.
How far can secondary recovery substitute for primary extraction, and which policy instruments unlock it?
MVI
A quantitative instrument measuring the exposure of an economy's strategic sectors to mineral supply disruption, integrating import dependence, supplier concentration and substitutability into a single comparable score.
MDLI
A companion instrument assessing how mineral positions across supply, processing and demand convert into negotiating leverage between states, tracked across minerals and country pairs.
