Making critical raw materials from a multi-scalar perspective: The case of lithium in the European Union

Abstract

• Criticality is performative and is both emerging from and accelerating resource-making practices. • The criticality of lithium operates through narratives and material interventions. • These narratives embed lithium in prosperity, security, and green responsibility discourses. • The ‘critical’ classification mobilises EU policies and legitimises European resource frontier expansion. • Multi-scalar analysis shows how EU criticality materialises in Spanish mining. This paper examines how the designation of lithium as a ‘critical raw material’ in the European Union shapes raw material politics and extraction dynamics at multiple scales. Drawing on document analysis, expert interviews, and field research in Brussels and Spain, we conceptualise criticality as performative and as both emerging from and accelerating resource-making practices. We demonstrate that criticality operates through two interrelated dimensions: First, on a discursive level, it assigns strategic value to lithium through narratives of prosperity, green responsibility, and security; second, on a material level, it enables territorial interventions through regulatory frameworks, funding mechanisms, and knowledge production. Analysing EU policies and lithium mining in Extremadura, Spain, we reveal how the classification of lithium as ‘critical’ legitimises extractive expansion and reorganises socio-spatial relations across the European resource frontier. The case illustrates how criticality functions as a political instrument with tangible effects, mobilising policies and justifying extractive interventions. This multi-scalar perspective contributes to resource geography by highlighting how technocratic classifications actively produce the conditions of their own necessity, transforming lithium from a mineral deposit into a resource essential for European geopolitical strategy, industrial development, and green transition.

Topics & Concepts