Challenging Industry Narratives on Transition Minerals

This is the challenge we were tasked with by London Mining Network (LMN), an alliance of human rights, development, environmental and solidarity groups, that focuses on holding mining companies accountable for their actions.

As economies rapidly shift to new technologies & modes of production, transition minerals are an increasingly important part of mining worldwide. Driven in particular by a global push for clean energy, transition minerals include lithium, nickel, and cobalt, and play a key role in technologies like EV batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines.

While a rapid shift away from fossil fuels remains essential, the extraction of these minerals must not come at the expense of local communities, mineworkers, or the environment. Mining companies, Governments and other entities are rapidly adopting narratives that justify these harms in the name of urgency and pragmatism. 

1. Narrative Mapping – to capture and understand the landscape of relevant major narratives at play in current discourse around Transition Mineral mining
2. Intervention Design – identifying the key barriers, and working with partners to develop approaches that can overcome them
3. Message Testing: Narrowing our approaches down to specific messaging routes, then testing them directly with audiences to identify the most effective, and produce guidance

The foundation of the project was laid with a streamlined but broad process of research and analysis that included partner meetings, literature reviews, media analysis, and informal stakeholder interviews. Our aim was to capture and distil the major narratives at play around the topic of transition mineral mining across government, industry, non-profits, campaigners, and beyond. This initial review identified four main narratives:

• ‘Critical Supply’, which emphasises the geopolitical competition for mineral supplies, and in particular the threat from China
• ‘Urgent Transition’, centring on the need for growth of renewable and related industries, and pragmatic compromises required 
• ‘Mining Reborn’, where the industry attempts to position itself as a technological innovator, and detach itself from a past abuses
• ‘System Shift’, in which campaigners & communities call for a radical transition to a new way paradigm of justice and equality

As shown in the simplified visual illustration of our mapping opposite, each of these narratives was analysed to identify the main values that they appeal to, the arguments they make, and the entities typically involved in their spreading and maintenance.

Based on this mapping of the relevant narrative landscape, we worked with LMN and partners to develop an initial set of three creative approaches that could be envisaged to make the case for more circular approaches, to counter arguments for expanded and damaging mining of transition minerals.

Broadly these focused in turn on 1) utilising national security arguments for expanded recycling and reduced reliance on mining 2) a more ‘positive’ optimistic framing of what could be achieved in the transition 3) in contrast, a focus on questioning the provenance of the minerals, and the products using them.

These initial approaches gave us broad strategic directions to start from, which could then be critiqued and refined. National security arguments, for instance, though already deployed by some organisations to make the case for reduced importation of mined minerals, would be ill suited to encouraging a focus on the impacts on communities in other countries.

Part of this process was also about applying a realistic assessment of the existing level of knowledge within our likely target audience. Any messaging approach we developed would have to make trade offs about where it was going to focus within this ‘funnel’, i.e. did we want to prioritise the majority who may not have heard of ‘transition minerals’ at all, and seek to get them interested and concerned, or to move those who have a greater level of existing knowledge (and may be more influential on decisions), closer to our in depth position. No messaging approach can do everything.

Through this process of interrogation and critical design, we refined our broad narrative routes into three distinct messaging approaches, which are described in the table below.

Sampling & Recruitment

With the help of LMN’s partner organisation War on Want, we were able to test the messaging with a sample of over 1000 of their supporters, via their email list. This gave us a good spread of the ‘environmentally concerned’ segment that were likely to be the immediate focus of any campaign. Throughout the project, it was supported by a range of different organisations from the wider movement, some of whose logos are shown opposite.

Format & Method

Utilising a straightforward online survey format, we included questions to capture not only the demographics of participants, but their existing level of knowledge about climate change and transition minerals, and attitudes towards such issues. This enabled us to understand in our analysis whether these factors had an impact on how people reacted to the different messaging approaches.

One quarter each of our participants were shown one of the three messages, while the remaining quarter were shown nothing, serving as a control group. A control group in testing is a scientifically recognised method that does not expose participants to the new messages, allowing us to make clear comparisons, rule out other influences on the outcomes, and accurately assess the effectiveness of our work.

Main Effectiveness Measure

During our research and mapping phase, we identified that a key pillar of arguments against focusing on the impacts of mineral mining was an appeal to urgency and pragmatism. For this reason, we decided to make a key measure of the effectiveness of our messaging approaches how well they could get participants to disagree more strongly with the following statement, representative of such arguments:

“Because the climate crisis is very urgent, we shouldn’t waste time worrying about where the raw materials we need to tackle it come from.”

Results

As shown in the graph opposite, two of our approaches – ‘Threat’ and ‘Solidarity’ came out as strongly effective on this measure, able to shift people significantly towards disagreeing with our effectiveness measure.

An ordinal regression analysis ensured that this was the case for all main demographics within our audience sample, including those with little knowledge of transition minerals or climate change.

Our final step then was to translate this into core guidance for the wider movement, setting out how the ‘Threat’ and ‘Solidarity’ messages could most effectively be used to achieve their ends. Two main outputs of this process are given below.

In March 2025, we pulled together the main findings and recommendations from the research and published them in our Challenging Industry Narratives on Transition Minerals: Messaging Guide.

The Messaging Guide was then launched at an online event, featuring expert speakers, including:

• Jaybee Garganera, National Coordinator of Alyansa Tigil Mina
• Sofija Stefanović, United Balkan Resistance and Labour (ZBOR)
• Jake Simms, Just Transition Coordinator, London Mining Network
• Daniel Stanley, Executive Director, Future Narratives Lab

If you’re interested in receiving a copy of the Messaging Guide, along with a recording of the Launch Event, you can request them by filling in the form opposite.