Securing extractive futures: unpacking the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act

In 2024 the European Union’s (EU’s) Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA) entered into force, seeking to ensure access to a secure and sustainable supply of critical raw materials (CRMs). While nominally predicated on just transition and climate mitigation narratives, implementation relies heavily on increasing extraction, largely outside the EU. Drawing on poststructuralist discourse analysis, we examine how the discourse within and around the CRMA evolved over time, and what shifts in framing can be observed in the EU’s quest to secure access to critical raw materials. Analyzing the CRMA alongside 32 official EU documents, we show how shifting meanings contribute to mobilizing and legitimizing secure access to CRMs. Socio-environmental safeguards become repositioned as barriers to secure an EU-first agenda, justifying deregulatory measures. Access to CRMs becomes increasingly imperative for EU interests, specifically security, while potential harms continue to be externalized to extractive regions. Reinforced by intensifying militarized geopolitical agendas in the EUs quest to secure CRMs, this paper shows how just transition discourse can serve to justify the maintenance of a political and economic order that began during formal colonialism. This holds important insights for transition scholars about how just transition language can be leveraged to increase extraction and securitization while marginalizing hard-won social and environmental safeguards. This illustrates how green colonialism further disadvantages peoples and places where CRMs are extracted and adds a militarized layer to the analysis as resource-control is leveraged for warfighting purposes.