Green promises, local conflicts: The political ecology of rare earth mining in Poços de Caldas, Brazil

The global energy transition depends heavily on critical minerals, including rare earths, and their extraction increasingly intensifies socio-environmental conflicts in territories marked by a long history of extractive activities. While the energy transition literature has extensively examined its technological and economic dimensions, the sociopolitical and territorial processes through which these conflicts emerge remain underexplored, particularly in mining regions of the Global South. This article seeks to address this gap by examining the emergence of environmental conflicts associated with rare earth mining in Poços de Caldas, Brazil. The case is situated within broader debates on extractive frontiers in emerging economies. We adopt a qualitative approach grounded in the Gioia Methodology, analyzing a corpus composed of news reports, social media posts, and institutional websites. The results show that these conflicts do not stem solely from direct environmental impacts. Instead, they emerge from the interplay between discourses of innovation and development, perceptions of socio-environmental risk, and disputes over corporate and political legitimacy. Rare earth mining is simultaneously framed as a strategic opportunity and contested as the continuation of an extractivist model reconfigured under the rhetoric of sustainability, yet still producing damage to the territory. The study contributes to debates on energy transition and political ecology by demonstrating that the dominant transition model reproduces territorial inequalities and environmental injustices.