Ambivalent Spaces of Hope: New Mining for Sustainable Futures in Left-Behind Places – ASH

This research examines the ‘landing’ of new mining projects in marginalized towns and regions in Europe, focusing on the intersections of extractivism, peripheralization, and future imaginaries. These projects are tied to sustainable development and reducing reliance on imports, further incentivized by the EU's Critical Raw Materials Act, national policies, and rising mineral prices. Often situated in socially and politically marginalized areas, new mining projects represent ambivalent spaces of hope. Our study explores this ambivalence by analyzing how new mining projects shape local future imaginations, policies, and spatial planning in peripheralized areas, reflecting broader geopolitical and ecological modernization promises in an increasingly polarized context.
The research focuses on two main areas: 1) the future imaginaries and narratives surrounding mining projects, and 2) the politics of downscaling of sustainable mining. The first area investigates how local actors perceive the future of mining projects, addressing uncertainty, potential benefits and risks, and the renegotiation of centrality, peripherality, and justice. The second examines how mining projects influence local policymaking and governance, focusing on power dynamics and processes regulation. Our goal is to understand how future narratives on mining affect urban and regional planning and how conflicts, compromises, and hybrid arrangements emerge.
Our central hypothesis is that new mining projects are more likely to be accepted in left-behind regions due to perceived economic and territorial benefits, despite the potential for exacerbating already existing political and ideological polarization. To test these hypotheses, we will conduct two case studies of the lithium mining project in Echassière and Montluçon / France and the copper mining project in Spremberg und Schleife / Germany, analyzing public debates, media reports, interviews and policy documents to understand the local re-negotiation processes and changing visions of the future.
This cross-national comparative approach offers a diverse exploration of the political and social impacts of mining projects on local contexts characterised by small towns, overcoming national biases and highlighting different locally hybridised models of ‘landing’. A key methodological innovation is the use of co-interviews, a collaborative and reflexive form data-gathering technique that deepens our understanding of the issues at stake. By focusing on critical raw material mining in Europe from a local perspective, this research contributes to an innovative intersection of debates on extractivism, territorial development, and sustainability, as well as on developing a novel methodological approach to transnational collaboration.