Conveners: Rebekah Lee and Doris Okenwa
Speaker: Patience Mususa (Nordic Africa Institute)
Global demand for minerals for renewable energy technologies, digitalization, and defence industries, amid geoeconomic competition, has seen countries and regions worldwide adopt policies to ensure the security of supply and support nascent green industrialization. This has seen industrialized countries in Asia, Europe, and the USA adopt both protectionist policies, such as in the electric vehicle industry, and simultaneously enter alliances with each other, and in partnerships with mineral-producing countries, in Africa and Latin America. With a youthful population, and consolidating urbanization, African countries more crucially, aim to add value to their mineral commodities and develop a manufacturing sector from mining that feeds into domestic and regional markets – such as for electrification, energy storage, transportation. They gear this towards addressing a large demand for decent jobs and filling a significant infrastructure gap. This has entailed a policy shift among African countries to see their mineral resources not only as important to the global supply chain, but crucially as strategic to their national and regional development plans. To this end, countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Zambia which are key global producers of copper and cobalt have a joint agenda to establish a regional battery industry which links to broader aspirations for increased continental trade. Focussing on these plans, and specifically on Zambia, the paper highlights the new policy landscapes that are emerging in these countries, and the contextual dynamics that shape them. Drawing on interviews in Zambia and ethnographic research from the Zambian Copperbelt, the paper makes a case on how perspectives from anthropology and human geography can shed some light on how place-based perspectives, link to wider national and global public policy making.
Patience Mususa is a Senior Researcher at the Nordic Africa Institute and a research affiliate of the Dag Hammarskjöld Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies at the Copperbelt University. She is also a visiting fellow of the Africa Policy Research Institute where she co-leads a project on Africa’s agenda for its green and transition minerals. An anthropologist with a background in architecture and working at the intersection of research and policy, Patience’s work covers an interest in mining and urbanisation, urban welfare and climate politics, with a focus on southern Africa, and specifically the Central African Copperbelt.
Patience Mususa, PhD
Senior Researcher, The Nordic Africa Institute
Email: patience.mususa@nai.uu.se
