Clean energy, dirty frontiers: Lithium extraction and the politics of justice in the energy transition

The accelerating global demand for energy transition minerals has expanded extractive frontiers across the Global South, raising important questions about how justice is negotiated in contexts where formal governance is weak. While lithium is widely promoted as essential to decarbonization, far less attention has been paid to how affected communities understand and contest the social, environmental, and political consequences of its extraction. Drawing on interviews and focus group discussions involving key informants across age, gender, and occupation in Patigi, Nigeria, this paper uses political ecology and compensational justice to examine how compensation operates as a site through which legitimacy, accountability, recognition, and inclusion are negotiated within an emerging artisanal lithium frontier. The findings show that lithium extraction has produced an informal governance regime characterized by elite capture, security corruption, labour precarity, gendered inequalities, migration, and socio-environmental degradation. They further demonstrate that compensation extends beyond financial remuneration and redress to function as a relational process through which communities evaluate fairness and negotiate claims to justice. The study also shows that extractive harms are understood through spiritual insecurity and the disruption of cultural relationships between people, land, and the more-than-human world. By situating these findings within debates on political ecology and green extractivism, the paper demonstrates how minerals mobilized for decarbonization can reproduce extractive injustices and reshape community social and moral life. The findings underscore the limitations of technocratic compensation frameworks and argue for approaches to energy transition governance that recognize compensation as a participatory and culturally grounded process of justice.