07/10/2025 | 12:45

Kam Pui Tsang

(IRES/LIDAM, UCLouvain)

will give a presentation on 

Dirty Green Transition: Chinese Critical Mineral Investment and Protest in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

China has become a leading investor in critical mineral extraction, a sector central to energy transition technologies. These investments often attract heightened scrutiny and are frequently associated with rising social unrest in host regions. This paper investigates how Chinese-owned critical mineral mining projects shape local protest dynamics across fifteen sub-Saharan African countries. Leveraging a novel panel dataset of geocoded Chinese critical mineral mining investments and a triple-differences design, I show that the opening of Chinese-owned mines raises the likelihood of local protest by 15 percentage points and increases protest events by 52% compared to similar non-Chinese mines. These effects are moderated in settings with stronger democratic institutions and higher-quality governance but show no consistent variation with measures of environmental sensitivity. Suggestive evidence points to substantial negative environmental externalities as a plausible channel linking Chinese critical mineral mining investment to elevated unrest.