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Centre for International Environmental Studies
21 April 2020

An insight from Jonas Köppel: Update on the Lithium Research Project

Jonas Köppel came back from his field work for the Lithium Research project due to the COVID-19. Here is an update and insight from his experience in Latin America. 

The LITHIUM research project team at the Graduate Institute is composed of Prof Marc Hufty, Dr Morgan Scoville-Simmonds and Jonas Köppel. The project started in July 2017 and will end in 2021.

As the Corona pandemic is bringing the world to a standstill our research on the global lithium industry and its governance is equally put on hold. In our partner countries Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile quarantine measures have made fieldwork impossible, while institutions such as universities have effectively stopped working. The lithium industry itself is being increasingly affected by disruptions in global consumer markets and supply chains.

Many projects are still nascent and sensible towards negative outlooks, as the recent decision by the French company Eramet to withdraw from lithium mining in Argentina exemplifies. In our research we track such changes in a joint effort to assess how global and local dynamics in lithium interact with each other. The project got off to a good start with a successful kick-off meeting in Salta, Argentina, last August. Bringing together different research groups working on lithium in South America and beyond enabled lively discussions, the joint definition of a research agenda, and the beginning of three publication projects for the following months.

Our common endeavor is to ground global dynamics related to lithium by focusing on territories of extraction, working both on local perspectives and regional comparison between Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile. Thereby, we put into practice what we see as the role of critical social science research, namely to inform public opinion and decision making by providing broader visions for complex problems while keeping marginalized spaces in view. The current Corona disruption is proving in real time the importance of such broader perspectives. While no one really knows how the world will look like after this disruption, the current dynamics in the lithium sector herald a certain reordering of global supply chains towards relocalization, as countries such as France seek to become less dependent on distant places to supply them with increasingly critical raw materials such as lithium.