The project

Green Dealings combines strategies of critical and engaged research for a just and sustainable lithium battery chain.

Cover image © by Felix Dorn

Research focus

The Green Dealings project seeks to understand how rules and relationships are being negotiated and reconfigured along the lithium battery chain between South America and Europe.

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Batteries are a crucial element for the ongoing energy transition and the European Union is developing a battery value chain within the region.

Yet, battery industries require large amounts of raw materials like lithium, which are mainly sourced from other regions like South America.

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Beyond critical analysis we explore how to achieve more sustainable and just relations between raw material producing and consuming regions.

Green Dealings briefly explained

Watch a short interview from the SNIS project launch where Jonas and Diego explain the main features of the project.

Project activities

The Green Dealings project is based on three main pillars that combine academic and engaged forms of research activities.

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Critical research

Monitor the emerging European battery sector and its implications for lithium producing regions.

Our research activities are organized in three working groups, focusing on particular arenas where relations are negotiated along the lithium battery chain.

1 Governance and standards

Research Problem

The European Union has declared remarkable ambitions to lead the global decarbonization agenda and, at the same time, to responsibly source critical materials for the energy transition, in particular for batteries. While policy and in-progress legislation set ambitious targets, there are relevant trade-offs that put at risks the possibility to simultaneously meet these objectives. This group seeks to understand the processes that configure the evolving multi-level and multi-stakeholder sustainability governance scheme for the lithium battery value chain. We also aim to identify crucial nodal points where multiple interests and actors converge to shape future negotiations, and where negotiations with raw material producing regions can be reshaped for a just energy transition.

Guiding questions

  • What are the features of the new system of rules (regulations, standards, norms) taking shape around the battery industry between the EU and South American lithium producers?
  • How is power transmitted through such systems and which actors are leading changes in the lithium battery chain?
  • What will be the global impacts of the developing new EU Battery Regulation and other related EU norms?
  • Does the EU have the normative power to export its socio-environmental standards to the world economy, leading to a “Brussels effect”?

We use a variety of research methods, including desk research, a Delphi study, interviews and online workshops with European and South American stakeholders.

Group lead: Diego Murguia

2 Narratives

Research problem

The nexus between salt flats, lithium, and batteries constitutes a discursive space for public debate around energy transition and its need for raw materials. Within this space, narratives are important tools employed by different actors to establish or contest relationships along the lithium battery chain. Non governmental organizations (NGOs) are key in these narrative politics as they form alliances across places of extraction and consumption. Doing so, they are involved in making different realities legible to each other, making them well aware of the frictions between local communities and global civil society.

Guiding questions

  • What narratives constitute the discursive space between salt flats, lithium, and batteries?
  • How do South American and European NGOs establish, employ, and contest narratives to intervene in this space?
  • How do they deal with the misunderstandings and frictions emerging as they form alliances across different places and realities?

Methodology

Our research is based on three main sets of activities:

  • Analysis of the public discourse around the relations between salt flats, lithium, and batteries
  • Interviews with NGO employees involved in alliances across South America and Europe
  • Participatory observation at events on the lithium battery chain

Group lead: Bárbara Jerez

3 Supply chains

Research problem

Due to its role in the ongoing energy transition, the battery sector is governed by novel normative frameworks, such as the EU battery regulation. The emerging policy seeks to place the European industry on a path towards producing the world’s greenest batteries. Particularly ambitious, it confronts European actors with new challenges as it establishes high standards in the whole life cycle of batteries up to the stage of raw material extraction. Yet, surging global demand for battery raw materials makes it increasingly difficult to secure reliable supply, confronting the sector with a “twin challenge” that entails significant uncertainties.

Guiding questions

In our research we explore the broader implications of this “twin challenge” in the case of lithium, focusing on the perspectives of different actors in the European battery sector (policy, research, industry).

  • How do different actors in the European battery sector understand the uncertainties that the “twin challenge” of lithium supply entails?
  • How do they reconfigure their supply chains as a way of addressing these challenges?
  • What are the implications of such reconfigurations for actors involved further up the battery chain?

Methodology

Our research is based on three main sets of activities:

  • Desk research on the negotiation process of the EU battery regulation
  • Interviews about the negotiation and implementation of the EU battery regulation with different actors in the European battery sector
  • Participatory observation at European events around batteries and raw materials

Group lead: Jonas Köppel and Daniela Sanchez-Lopez

Engaged research

Engage stakeholders in the research activities to foster cross-regional dialogue and collaboration.

1 Delphi study

Our Delphi survey will provide insights into the perceptions of a wide range of stakeholders about the justice and sustainability challenges along the lithium-ion battery chain.

The Delphi methodology provides valuable information about the opinion of experts and other actors involved in a topic in which there is scarce information available. The survey is anonymous and has an iterative dynamic, developed in several rounds, in which the results from the previous rounds are circulated among participants. This allows to identify the areas of dissent and contribute to build some agreement around key issues.

More specifically, our Delphi study aims to identify:
1. challenges that the global battery chain poses for the economic, social and environmental sustainability of the South American countries in which lithium mining takes place.
2. factors that facilitate or hinder the battery chain to be considered fair for these countries.
3. initiatives or tools that are capable to improve the conditions of sustainability and justice.

The survey will gather information and opinions from experts and other actors involved in the lithium battery chain –from mining to the production of electric vehicles and battery recycling–, with experience in different fields: government, industry, NGOs, civil society, academia.

Between rounds, participants will know the results of the previous round and be invited to comment on them. After the survey we will invite them to a virtual workshop session to present the final results and gather further comments and impressions. In addition, they will receive a publication with the analysis of the results.

We will publish a report with the final results. Thanks to our institutional partner network we hope to circulate the results with policy makers and other relevant audiences. Our project will thereby contribute to defining key initiatives and public policies to achieve a more sustainable and just lithium battery chain.

Interested to participate? To our Delphi study.

2 Stakeholder workshops

We will organize four virtual workshops with the objective of identifying the challenges and opportunities to achieve a fair and sustainable lithium battery value chain. The workshops will also be an opportunity to present and discuss the results of our Delphi study.

Furthermore, we will seek to collectively think of potential avenues to reach the objectives of fairness and sustainability by addressing the following questions: What can be done to favor a sustainable and equitable transition? Who could do it? What policy instruments or initiatives are needed?

The workshops will be based on participatory activities organized by facilitators. They will be an opportunity to promote the exchange of ideas and build bridges for the construction of new networks. Each meeting will gather members of different groups of stakeholders:

 

  1. Civil society organizations, including indigenous communities.
  2. Li-ion value chain companies.
  3. Government officials.
  4. Academics.

Knowledge circulation

We ensure that the knowledge we produce not only serves to further scientific debates, but is useful for relevant stakeholders, and is actually taken up and applied. Doing so we improve attention to sustainability and justice-related issues within the lithium battery chain. We adopt a unique three-pronged approach to knowledge circulation, going beyond one-way conceptions of knowledge “dissemination”.

1 Producing relevant knowledge

Scientific knowledge is not always seen as relevant, or in the right format, for different stakeholders. The Green Dealings project ensures useful and relevant knowledge through an assessment of knowledge needs. To aid in this, we engage, as partners in the project, important actors responsible for agenda setting, policy coordination, and the production of standards for the lithium and battery-related industries. We include further stakeholders through a first consultation process through the Delphi study and Stakeholder Workshop Series. This process allows us to adapt the research to ensure relevance for addressing the challenges for a more just and sustainable lithium “deal” between South America and Europe.

2 Knowledge validation

To further ensure that “we got it right” – that our results are valid and relevant for stakeholders – we facilitate a knowledge validation and reflection process on the project results. This is based on so-called “deliberative” approaches to science-policy interactions, which recognizes that there are diverse forms of expertise, each having value. Including a wider network of stakeholders we organize a Science-Policy Conference near the end of the project (Geneva/online, 2023) to present, validate, and as the case may be, debate, the project results. We focus on how the knowledge produced can be employed to foster critical conversation and productive collaboration between European and South American actors related to the lithium battery sector.

3 Traditional academic and policy-oriented dissemination

Scientific dissemination
We publish several articles in high-impact peer-reviewed scientific journals presenting the results of the research project. These seek to build the existing scientific knowledge based on how extractives, battery industries, and ‘green’ policy-making interact to reshape relations between South America and Europe. On a broader level, these also seek to support an increasing focus in the scientific literature on the political, sustainability, and justice-related dimensions of the energy transition and battery industries, to-date dominated by technical knowledge, thereby providing a more complete picture of the issues.

Further scientific dissemination takes the form of participation in scientific conferences. The project has and is continuing to organize several scientific presentations and discussion panels, emphasizing the contribution of junior researchers to build and recognize growing competences. Panels and conferences emphasizing the participation of researchers from both North and South are prioritized, as well as those with a high profile in terms of scientific and policy visibility.

Policy-oriented communication
Several policy-oriented papers are planned. For greatest visibility and relevance, we coordinate these publications with our institutional partners who are closely linked to policy. These publications will target both South American and European actors linked to policies related to battery value chains, energy transition, green policy, and mineral extraction.

Broader public – websites and blogs
In addition, green-dealings.com is kept regularly updated. Blog articles by many of our researchers – as well as the broader lithium-related research and policy community – are published on lithiumworlds.com, an innovative initiative launched under our previous project, LITHIUM that seeks to make connections between diverse publics related to lithium (industry, government, academia, in South America and Europe).