Programmes
How productive capacity is built where things are used, who captures the value, and whether the workforce capability a plant assumes actually arrives with it.
Critical raw materials and processing is where the transition's material bill actually gets paid. The Lab studies who negotiates the extraction, who runs the refinery, and what share of the resulting value stays in the country the ore came from. Ownership of the geological survey, the terms of the offtake, and the workforce that operates the plant are all parts of the same distributional question.
Circular economy and e-waste is the other half of the same chain. Secondary materials and second-life equipment are cheaper, less carbon-intensive and structurally awkward to qualify. The Lab looks at whether recycled and reused streams reach the customers that would use them, how end-of-life claims are verified, and where a promise of a circular chain quietly reverts to a linear one.
Assembly, suppliers and workforce capability asks whether the plant a policy assumes will actually be there in five years. Capability accumulates over decades, disperses in a few, and is not recoverable on the same timescale. The Lab documents which supplier ecosystems form around a new line, which do not, and what the wage and skills trajectory of the people on that line looks like against the plans that were made for them.
The multiplier is real, but only if the value is genuinely retained. Assembly that imports every component and exports the margin delivers little.
The Lab documents the difference: whether local suppliers are truly integrated or left at the low-skill edge, whether the jobs created are quality jobs, and whether small enterprises benefit or are squeezed. Those distributional findings are what a partner needs to know before claiming a development dividend, and what they cannot get from output figures alone.
Why the geological survey is not preliminary to a licensing negotiation but the negotiation itself.
Read →Incommensurability inside sustainable finance taxonomies, and who gets to decide which harms count.
Read →Ghana miners and the monopsony a local-content rule quietly creates.
Read →Firm and state capability, not capital, is the binding constraint on the transition speed.
Read →Taranto and the displaced-worker evidence that says most of the loss is lower wages, permanently.
Read →The AfCFTA anchor-project logic, and the obstacles that are not tariffs.
Read →For the full series across every research area, see Articles.
If you are building or backing productive capacity where things are used, tell us the decision you are facing.
