INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RESEARCH AND INNOVATION IN SOCIAL SCIENCE (IJRISS)

ISSN No. 2454-6186 | DOI: 10.47772/IJRISS | Volume X Issue III March 2026

Geopolitics, Power, Space and Resources in the Quest for Sustainable

Development

¹Kerry Muhati., ²Prof. Samuel Nyanchoga, Ph.D

¹PhD Student, Field of Peace and Security Sustainment

²Lecturer, School of Arts and Social Sciences, Tangaza University

DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.47772/IJRISS.2026.100300203

Received: 11 March 2026; Accepted: 16 March 2026; Published: 31 March 2026

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper is to examine the interrelationship between intensifying geopolitical competition and

the global pursuit of sustainable development in the twenty-first century. The key objectives are to analyse how

geopolitical dynamics shape and constrain sustainable development, to explore the interaction between power,

spatial contestation, and resource competition, and to assess their implications for achieving global development

goals. The study adopts an interdisciplinary methodology, drawing on critical geopolitics, political ecology,

international relations theory, and development studies, supported by comparative case studies and the use of

statistical and environmental performance data. The findings demonstrate that geopolitical competition

significantly influences development outcomes through three main dimensions: the distribution of power in the

international system, the governance and contestation of geographic space, and competition over natural

resources such as fossil fuels, critical minerals, and freshwater. Case studies reveal stark inequalities between

developed and developing countries, showing how structural power imbalances hinder equitable progress toward

sustainable development. The study also finds that traditional geopolitical approaches often undermine

cooperative frameworks necessary for sustainability, while alternative perspectives rooted in critical and

environmental geopolitics provide pathways for more collaborative and inclusive governance. The paper

concludes that sustainable development and geopolitics are fundamentally interconnected and must be analysed

within a unified framework. It proposes a reconceptualised “green geopolitics” that integrates power, ecological

sustainability, and global cooperation, offering important implications for policy, theory, and the future of global

governance.

Keywords: geopolitics; critical geopolitics; power; space; natural resources; sustainable development; SDGs;

political ecology; energy transition; Global South; civil society; regional institutions; comparative governance

INTRODUCTION

Few analytical challenges in modern-day international studies are more critical, more conceptually challenging,

than that between geopolitics and sustainable development. On the surface, these seem like different areas of

inquiry: geopolitics is concerned with the ways in which geographic factors, spatial arrangements and material

resources shape the distribution and exercise of political power between and within states; and sustainable

development is concerned with the economic, social and ecological conditions that enable human wellbeing

across and within generations. In practice these domains are intimately and inextricably intertwined. The

competition for power, the contestation of space, and the struggle for access to resources which are the

fundamental dynamics of geopolitical life — are at the same time the structural conditions under which

sustainable development must be sought. Understanding this relationship its tensions as well as its sometimes

fruitful possibilities is important to scholars and practitioners who are committed to struggling for the emergence

of a more equitable and ecologically sustainable world order.

The pertinence of this enquiry has grown considerably in the years that have passed since the adoption of the

2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in 2015. The seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs),

which are a manifestation of a global commitment to end poverty, reduce inequality, combat climate change,

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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RESEARCH AND INNOVATION IN SOCIAL SCIENCE (IJRISS)

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protect biodiversity, and ensure equality of basic services, were intended to be universal in their application and

transformative in ambition (United Nations, 2022). Yet the institutional and political climate in which these

goals must be reached has become substantially more difficult. The resumption of great-power competition

between the United States and China has complicated multilateral cooperation; the Russian invasion of Ukraine

in 2022 destabilised global energy and food markets with outsized, disproportionate impact on the most

vulnerable populations; climate change has intensified resource scarcity and territorial disputes; and the rising

tide of resource nationalism has complicated the international cooperation needed for a just and rapid energy

transition (Flint, 2022; Klare, 2019; Scholte et al., 2021). These are not marginal complications to the sustainable

development agenda they are structural features of the geopolitical environment that fundamentally determine

what is possible, how fast, and for whom.

This article makes three related arguments. First, it asserts that asymmetries of geopolitical power including the

structural advantages possessed by dominant states in international economic and institutional governance

systematically constrain the developmental options available to states in the Global South, engendering a

condition of dependent development that is inconsistent with the equity dimensions of sustainable development.

Second, it argues that the contestation of geographic space including territorial disputes, the governance of global

commons, and the increasingly contentious politics of climate-related territorial change creates security

environments and governance failures that stand in direct contradiction to sustainable development. Third, it

argues that resource competition both in its classical fossil fuel dimensions and its increasingly consequential

critical minerals dimensions creates distributional conflicts and governance gaps that cannot be resolved within

the framework of classical geopolitical reasoning.

To animate these analytical arguments, the article draws on detailed case studies from diverse regional contexts

including sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, the Arctic, and Latin America and compares governance

experiences across developed and developing country settings. Statistical data and environmental indicators are

integrated throughout to ground theoretical claims in measurable terms. A dedicated section addresses the roles

of regional institutions, civil society organisations, and local communities as critical actors in the promotion of

sustainable resource governance, actors whose importance has been systematically undervalued in mainstream

geopolitical analysis.

The article synthesises scholarship from four intellectual traditions: critical geopolitics, environmental

geopolitics, political ecology, and critical development studies. This multi-disciplinary approach reflects the

conviction that the problems at the intersection of geopolitics and sustainable development exceed the analytical

capacity of any single disciplinary tradition and require the integration of political, geographic, ecological, and

economic analysis into a coherent interpretive framework. The article is organised through nine sections,

proceeding from theoretical foundations through empirical analysis of power, space, and resources, through an

examination of civil society and regional institutional dynamics, toward analytical and normative conclusions.

From Classical to Critical Geopolitics: Theoretical Evolution

Geopolitics as an organised intellectual tradition evolved in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in the

context of European imperialism and within the intellectual currents of social Darwinism, environmental

determinism, and strategic realism. The founding contributions of Halford Mackinder — who in 1904 provided

the concept of the Heartland as the geographical pivot of world history — and Friedrich Ratzel, whose concept

of Lebensraum provided the vocabulary for territorial expansionism, built a framework in which the physical

features of the earth were understood to structure constraints on political possibility, channelling state behaviour

toward territorial aggrandisement and resource accumulation (Flint, 2022). Alfred Thayer Mahan's theorisation

of sea power, and Nicholas Spykman's reformulation of Mackinder's thesis in terms of the rimland, completed

the classical geopolitical canon: a body of strategic thinking in which geographic location, territorial control,

and resource access were the central determinants of state power and international order.

Classical geopolitics, for all its intellectual cogency, rested on assumptions now subject to comprehensive

challenge. Its geographic determinism naturalised political arrangements that were in reality historically

produced and socially contested. Its preoccupation with state competition and territorial expansion marginalised

questions of distributive justice, ecological sustainability, and the rights of non-state actors. And its self-

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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RESEARCH AND INNOVATION IN SOCIAL SCIENCE (IJRISS)

ISSN No. 2454-6186 | DOI: 10.47772/IJRISS | Volume X Issue III March 2026

presentation as the neutral ground of inter-state competition obscured the ways in which geographical knowledge

is itself politically produced, serving the interests of dominant actors and legitimising particular configurations

of power (O'Tuathail, 1996, as cited in Dalby, 2020; Muller, 2019). The critical geopolitics movement emerging

from the work of Gearóid Ó Tuathail, John Agnew, and Simon Dalby in the 1990s sought to overcome these

limitations by relocating geopolitical discourse from the objective description of geographic reality to a site of

political contestation. Within such a framework, the designation of particular regions as strategic, peripheral, or

threatening is not a neutral geographical description but a political act of representation that determines how

regions are governed, who bears the costs of that governance, and whose development aspirations are recognised

as legitimate (Dalby, 2020; Muller, 2019).

The emergence of environmental geopolitics or, to adopt Dalby's (2020) useful term, the 'geopolitics of the

Anthropocene' represents a particularly productive extension of critical geopolitical analysis. Within the

Anthropocene framework, the traditional geopolitical preoccupation with bounded territorial spaces and

interstate competition is radically complicated by the recognition that human economic activity has produced

planetary-scale ecological modifications anthropogenic climate change, mass extinction, ocean acidification,

and the disruption of nitrogen and phosphorus cycles that cannot be governed within the territorially fragmented

framework of the Westphalian state system. The atmosphere, the ocean, and the global biosphere are commons

whose stability is a precondition for all forms of human development, yet these commons are governed, or rather

systematically mismanaged, through institutions expressing the power asymmetries and competitive logics of

classical geopolitics rather than the collective ecological imperatives of the Anthropocene (Dalby, 2020; Burchill

et al., 2022).

Complementary theoretical resources are provided by political ecology, a tradition of scholarship that explores

the relationships among political economy, ecological processes, and social power in the governance of natural

environments (Büscher & Fletcher, 2020). Political ecology attends to the ways in which resource extraction,

land use change, and environmental governance generate and reproduce social inequalities, producing

distributional conflicts that are obscured by classical geopolitics and conventional development economics. The

concept of accumulation by dispossession, developed by Harvey (2004) and applied by subsequent scholars to

resource extraction in the Global South, is a particularly important analytical tool for understanding how

geopolitical resource competition translates into local developmental and ecological harm — dislodging

communities from land, water, and biodiversity on which their livelihoods depend in order to provide the raw

materials that fuel global economic growth and sustain the power of dominant states and corporations (Büscher

& Fletcher, 2020; Hickel, 2021). Postcolonial geopolitics further contributes to this framework by accounting

for the historical specificities of how colonial territorial arrangements, regimes of resource extraction, and

governance institutions continue to shape the geopolitical constraints encountered by developing countries today.

The Geopolitics of Power

Structural Power, Hegemony, and Development Finance

Power in its multiple and overlapping forms is the central preoccupation of geopolitical analysis, and the

distribution of power in the international system has direct and often determining consequences for the prospects

of sustainable development. Classical realist geopolitics privileged military power as the ultimate currency of

interstate relations. While military power remains significant, as evidenced by the Russian invasion of Ukraine

and Chinese assertiveness in the South China Sea, the forms of power that matter most to sustainable

development are predominantly non-military: structural power over the rules and institutions of global economic

governance; technological power in the form of innovation leadership and intellectual property control; and

financial power the ability to direct development capital, shape conditionality frameworks, and determine the

terms on which states access international credit markets (Gallagher & Kozul-Wright, 2022).

Structural power, in Susan Strange's formulation, is the power to shape the frameworks within which other actors

must operate, rather than simply to coerce other actors within existing arrangements. Applied to sustainable

development, structural power analysis reveals how the architecture of global economic governance the IMF,

World Bank, World Trade Organisation, and the complex of bilateral investment treaties and trade agreements

reflects and reproduces the interests of the advanced industrial economies that designed these institutions in the

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post-Second World War period (Gallagher & Kozul-Wright, 2022). The conditionality frameworks attached to

IMF structural adjustment programmes and World Bank development lending have historically foregrounded

fiscal consolidation, trade liberalisation, and private sector primacy at the expense of social protection, ecological

management, and productive diversification. The intellectual property regimes enshrined in WTO agreements

constrain developing country access to the clean technologies required for low-carbon development pathways.

Agricultural subsidy structures maintained by the European Union and the United States systematically

disadvantage smallholder farmers in developing economies, undermining food security and rural livelihoods in

direct contradiction of the SDG commitments held by those same governments (Hickel, 2021; Gallagher &

Kozul-Wright, 2022).

USD ~89.6 billion — still below the $100B Copenhagen

pledge

Global climate finance mobilised (2022)

Developing country share of IFI voting rights

Technology transfer mechanisms (SDG 17)

Under-represented relative to economic size and population

share

No binding multilateral framework operational as of 2024

Average 18–20% of government revenues directed to debt

service

Sovereign debt servicing costs (sub-Saharan

Africa)

Over 80% held by G7 economies and China (IRENA, 2023)

Clean tech patent ownership

Case Study: Norway vs. Nigeria: Divergent Governance of Oil Wealth

Norway and Nigeria both experienced major oil discoveries Norway in the North Sea (1969) and Nigeria in the

Niger Delta (1956) yet their developmental trajectories diverged radically. Norway established the Government

Pension Fund Global in 1990, now exceeding USD 1.7 trillion, governed by transparent fiscal rules that reinvest

petroleum revenues into sovereign wealth for future generations. Rigorous environmental regulations, domestic

content requirements, and robust anti-corruption frameworks ensured that oil wealth translated into broad-based

social welfare, low inequality (Gini coefficient ~0.26), and high human development index rankings.

Nigeria, by contrast, has earned an estimated USD 1 trillion in oil revenues since independence, yet remains

among the poorest countries globally, with over 40% of its population living in multidimensional poverty

(UNDP, 2023). Structural factors including colonial resource extraction legacies, elite capture, weak institutions,

and IMF-mandated subsidy removal have reproduced what scholars term the 'resource curse': a paradox in which

resource abundance generates fiscal dependence, governance fragility, and developmental stagnation. The Niger

Delta, source of Nigeria's oil wealth, remains one of the most environmentally degraded regions in the world,

with over 40 years of oil spills documented by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP, 2011).

This comparison illustrates how geopolitical power structures including access to international capital markets,

technological capacity, and institutional autonomy mediate the developmental outcomes of resource wealth far

more than resource endowment itself. It also underscores the critical importance of SDG 16 (Peace, Justice and

Strong Institutions) and SDG 17 (Partnerships for the Goals) as preconditions for the resource governance that

SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth) requires.

Great-Power Competition and the Multilateral Order

The intensification of great-power competition between the United States and China has added a new and

complicating dimension to the geopolitics of power as it bears on sustainable development. China's emergence

as a global development finance actor most dramatically expressed through the Belt and Road Initiative, which

has channelled over USD 1 trillion in infrastructure investment to more than 140 countries has disrupted the

post-Cold War pattern of Western-dominated development finance and opened new alternatives for developing

country governments seeking options beyond the conditionality-laden financing of Bretton Woods institutions

(Flint, 2022). However, the BRI has also generated geopolitical dependency dynamics, created substantial debt

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obligations in recipient countries, and in many instances reproduced extractive development models that

prioritise Chinese geopolitical and economic interests over the long-term developmental and ecological needs

of recipient countries (Rolland, 2019, as cited in Flint, 2022).

The framing of Sino-American competition in increasingly zero-sum terms reflected in US CHIP legislation

limiting semiconductor exports, the securitisation of critical mineral supply chains, and the competitive framing

of green industrial policy through the Inflation Reduction Act has further complicated the cooperative

multilateralism that sustainable development governance requires (Scholte et al., 2021). These dynamics extend

beyond the headlines of superpower rivalry to encompass the broader structure of North-South relations. The

ongoing underrepresentation of developing countries in IFI governance structures, the persistent insufficiency

of climate finance pledges, and the systematic failure to deliver technology transfer provisions embedded in

multilateral environmental agreements all illustrate how structural power reproduces arrangements that serve

dominant states while imposing disproportionate costs on those least responsible for the problems sustainable

development must address (Okereke, 2021; Hickel, 2021).

Dimension

Developed Countries (Global North)

Developing Countries (Global South)

Weighted

institutional decisions

majority;

control

key Structurally underrepresented; limited agenda-

setting power

IFI Voting Rights

Pledge-makers;

repeatedly missed

USD

100B

target Pledge-recipients; climate finance needs vastly

exceed flows

Climate Finance

Technology Access

Debt Architecture

Lead patent holders; set licensing terms Dependent on technology transfer; IP regimes

limit access

Investment-grade credit; low borrowing Junk-rated debt; high risk premiums drain

costs

developmental budgets

IRA,

domestic industry

EU

Green

Deal:

subsidise Limited fiscal space; compete for FDI on

unfavourable terms

Green

Policy

Industrial

SDG Linkages

SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities): Power asymmetries in global governance perpetuate North-South structural

inequalities, directly undermining SDG 10 targets on international financial architecture reform.

SDG 17 (Partnerships for the Goals): Great-power competition fragments multilateral cooperation precisely

when SDG 17's call for technology transfer, climate finance, and policy coherence demands it most.

SDG 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions): The erosion of rules-based multilateralism weakens the

institutional environments that SDG 16 seeks to build.

The Geopolitics of Space

Territorial Sovereignty and Its Ecological Limits

Space, as a geopolitical category, encompasses both the physical territory over which states claim and exercise

sovereign authority, and the broader spatial frameworks through which human activity is organised, regulated,

and contested. The relationship between the geopolitics of space and sustainable development operates across

multiple scales from the micro-scale of community land rights and local ecological governance to the macro-

scale of territorial conflict between states and the governance architecture of planetary commons.

At the most fundamental level, the Westphalian principle of territorial sovereignty organises the basic conditions

under which sustainable development must be pursued. This principle has been instrumental in establishing the

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right of states and developed states in particular to determine their own developmental trajectories without

external interference, as articulated in the doctrine of permanent sovereignty over natural resources (United

Nations, 2022). However, territorial sovereignty is also a source of structural tension with ecological

sustainability in at least two analytically discrete ways. First, the imperative of national economic development

creates pressures for resource extraction and land use intensification that frequently conflict with ecological

limits imposed by global biospheric systems. The logic of territorial sovereignty creates an incentive for states

to internalise the economic benefits of resource exploitation while externalising ecological costs onto shared

atmospheric, oceanic, and hydrological systems — collective goods that lie beyond the regulatory reach of any

single sovereign authority (Dalby, 2020; Büscher & Fletcher, 2020). Second, territorial conflicts between states

over contested boundaries, adjacent resource zones, and strategic waterways divert resources from

developmental priorities and generate humanitarian crises that reverse decades of accumulated development

gains.

Over 100 active maritime boundary disputes globally

Countries with contested maritime

boundaries (2023)

~17% of land surface — well below 30% target of Kunming-Montreal

Framework

Global protected area coverage

(land)

276 internationally shared river basins covering ~60% of global freshwater

flow

Transboundary river basins

Climate displacement (2022)

Arctic ice loss rate

Approximately 21.5 million people displaced by weather-related events

(UNHCR)

~13% reduction per decade since satellite records began (NASA, 2023)

Maritime Space and the Governance of Global Commons

The governance of maritime space is among the most consequential and contested dimensions of contemporary

geopolitical rivalry, with far-reaching implications for sustainable development. The United Nations Convention

on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), entering into force in 1994, established a framework for maritime jurisdiction

including exclusive economic zones of 200 nautical miles from coastal baselines within which states hold

sovereign rights over marine resources. The UNCLOS framework has proved both an outstanding governance

achievement and an enduring source of geopolitical tension, as competing states advance overlapping

jurisdictional claims over strategically and economically valuable maritime zones. China's expansive claims over

the South China Sea contested by Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, and Taiwan, and rejected by the

Permanent Court of Arbitration in 2016 represent the most prominent example of contemporary maritime

geopolitical rivalry, but disputes over Arctic maritime boundaries, East China Sea demarcation, and West

African offshore zones illustrate the continuance of territorial competition as a structural feature of contemporary

geopolitics (Flint, 2022; Okereke, 2021).

The Arctic is emerging as a particularly consequential new geopolitical space. As climate change reduces sea

ice coverage at rates of approximately 13% per decade (NASA, 2023), the region is becoming the site of

intensifying competition among Russia, the United States, Canada, Norway, and China — which has designated

itself a 'near-Arctic state'. The developmental implications of Arctic geopolitical competition — for indigenous

communities, for the global climate system which depends on polar ice as a key component of planetary albedo

regulation, and for the environmental integrity of Arctic marine ecosystems testify to the direct link between

spatial geopolitics and planetary sustainability outcomes (Dalby, 2020; Klare, 2019).

Case Study: The South China Sea: Geopolitical Competition and Marine Ecosystem Governance

The South China Sea, through which approximately USD 3–5 trillion in global trade transits annually, sits at the

intersection of some of the world's most consequential geopolitical tensions and some of its most ecologically

significant marine environments. The sea encompasses the Coral Triangle the global centre of marine

biodiversity and provides food security for an estimated 3.7 billion people who depend on fish as their primary

protein source across the wider Asia-Pacific region.

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China's island-building programme in the Spratly and Paracel Islands, covering approximately 3,200 acres of

reclaimed land since 2013, has been accompanied by extensive coral reef destruction and has severely disrupted

the marine ecosystems upon which coastal fishing communities across the Philippines, Vietnam, and Indonesia

depend. The UN Environment Programme has estimated that South China Sea reef destruction threatens the

livelihoods of between 100,000 and 200,000 small-scale fishers directly. Militarisation of the contested zone has

also restricted Vietnamese and Filipino fishing fleets from traditional fishing grounds, generating food insecurity

that disproportionately affects low-income coastal communities.

The case illustrates the intersection of SDG 14 (Life Below Water) and SDG 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong

Institutions): geopolitical territorial competition directly undermines marine ecosystem governance, with the

heaviest developmental costs borne not by the competing great powers but by the fishing communities of smaller

regional states whose food sovereignty and livelihoods depend on the stable governance of a shared maritime

commons.

SDG Linkages

SDG 14 (Life Below Water): Contested maritime governance and illegal fishing undermine the SDG 14 targets

on marine conservation and sustainable fisheries management.

SDG 13 (Climate Action): The atmosphere as a global common is undermined by the same territorial

fragmentation that impedes effective multilateral climate governance.

SDG 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions): Maritime territorial disputes generate security environments

that crowd out governance attention from developmental priorities.

The Geopolitics of Resources

Fossil Fuels and the Contested Energy Transition

Resources understood as the material inputs to economic and political power have always been central to

geopolitical analysis, but the particular configuration of resource competition characterizing the contemporary

moment is unprecedented in several important respects. The intersection of three great resource dynamics the

managed decline of fossil fuel economies under the pressure of decarbonisation, intensifying competition for

critical minerals essential to clean energy and digital technologies, and the impending scarcity and geopolitical

salience of freshwater creates a resource geopolitical environment of particular complexity and consequence for

sustainable development.

The geopolitics of fossil fuel energy that structured much of twentieth century international politics is undergoing

a fundamental transformation driven by the imperative of climate stabilisation and the rapid cost decline in

renewable energy technologies. This transformation is geopolitically consequential in unevenly distributed ways.

For nations in the Global North, the shift away from fossil fuels provides both energy security benefits and

industrial growth advantages in green manufacturing. For states heavily reliant on fossil fuel exports particularly

in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America the energy transition presents acute developmental

challenges, risking the stranding of physical assets and human capital at precisely the moment when sustained

investment in education, healthcare, and economic diversification is most urgently needed (Klare, 2019; Hickel,

2021). The geopolitical dimension of this asymmetry is compounded by the fact that the pace, direction, and

institutional framework of the energy transition are predominantly determined by policy decisions and

technological trajectories in the Global North, over which fossil fuel-dependent developing economies have

minimal influence reproducing in a new register the structural dependency relationships that have characterised

North-South economic relations throughout the post-colonial period.

Case Study: Bolivia's Lithium Nationalisation: Resource Sovereignty and the Energy Transition

Bolivia possesses the world's largest estimated lithium reserves, concentrated in the Salar de Uyuni salt flat —

a resource whose value has grown exponentially as global demand for electric vehicle batteries surges. Bolivia's

2023 decision to nationalise its lithium resources through a state enterprise, Yacimientos de Litio Bolivianos

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(YLB), and to pursue domestic processing and battery manufacturing rather than raw ore export, represents a

deliberate attempt to break the extractive colonial pattern in which mineral-rich developing countries export raw

commodities and import high-value processed goods.

The case reveals the acute tensions at the intersection of resource geopolitics and sustainable development. On

one hand, Bolivia's resource sovereignty strategy aligns with SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth) and

SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure) by seeking to capture value-added manufacturing employment

and fiscal revenues domestically. On the other hand, the strategy faces formidable structural obstacles: limited

domestic technological capacity, limited access to international green technology markets dominated by Chinese

and US firms, and the geopolitical leverage exercised by major battery-producing economies through supply

chain control.

Bolivia's experience also raises critical questions about environmental justice. Lithium extraction in the Salar de

Uyuni raises serious concerns about water consumption — a particularly acute issue in the Bolivian altiplano,

where local indigenous communities depend on scarce water resources — and about the distribution of benefits

between the national state and the Aymara and Quechua communities on whose ancestral territories extraction

takes place. These tensions reflect a broader pattern in which the green energy transition, unless actively

governed to protect community rights, risks reproducing the extractive dynamics it purports to supersede.

Critical Minerals and the New Resource Geopolitics

The emergence of critical minerals as a new axis of geopolitical competition is among the most significant and

poorly regulated resource issues of the twenty-first century. The decarbonisation of energy, transport, and

industrial systems requires massive quantities of lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese, graphite, and rare earth

elements as inputs to batteries, electric motors, wind turbines, and solar panels. The geographic concentration of

these mineral deposits the Lithium Triangle of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile holds over 60% of identified lithium

reserves; the Democratic Republic of Congo produces approximately 70% of global cobalt output; and China

dominates both rare earth extraction and the downstream processing capacity that converts raw materials into

technologically usable forms — creates geopolitical dependencies and supply chain vulnerabilities that

governments and corporations in advanced industrial economies have identified as matters of strategic national

interest (Kalantzakos, 2020; Klare, 2019).

The competitive responses to these perceived vulnerabilities the United States' Critical Minerals Strategy, the

European Union's Critical Raw Materials Act, and China's maintenance of dominant processing capacity coupled

with strategic export controls on rare earth elements are ushering in a new phase of resource geopolitics whose

regulatory and developmental implications are not yet fully understood. For sustainable development in mineral-

rich developing economies, the implications are characterised by acute ambivalence. Rising demand for

transition minerals offers potentially large economic opportunities, including strategies of resource-based

industrialisation. However, the escalation of geopolitical competition risks re-enacting extractive colonial

dynamics under the paradoxical banner of green development (Kalantzakos, 2020; Büscher & Fletcher, 2020).

Case Study: The Democratic Republic of Congo: Cobalt, Conflict, and Sustainable Development

The Democratic Republic of Congo supplies approximately 70% of global cobalt a mineral indispensable to the

lithium-ion batteries powering electric vehicles and consumer electronics. Yet the DRC consistently ranks

among the bottom five countries globally on the Human Development Index (HDI), with over 70% of its

population living in extreme poverty (World Bank, 2023). This paradox of resource wealth amidst acute human

deprivation exemplifies what critical political economists term the 'resource curse' but its roots lie less in any

inherent property of mineral wealth than in the specific geopolitical and governance structures through which

that wealth is extracted, priced, and appropriated.

Artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) in the DRC's Lualaba and Haut-Katanga provinces involves an

estimated 150,000 to 200,000 diggers, including documented cases of child labour in hazardous conditions,

operating largely outside formal regulatory frameworks. Global battery manufacturers and electric vehicle

companies predominantly headquartered in the United States, Europe, Japan, South Korea, and China have faced

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mounting pressure from civil society organisations to audit and clean their cobalt supply chains. The OECD Due

Diligence Guidance for Responsible Supply Chains of Minerals from Conflict-Affected and High-Risk Areas

(2016) provides a voluntary framework, but compliance remains inconsistent and enforcement weak.

The DRC cobalt case demonstrates the direct linkages between SDG 8 (Decent Work), SDG 10 (Reduced

Inequalities), and SDG 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions). It also illustrates how the governance gap

between global demand for transition minerals and effective regulation of their extraction generates

developmental outcomes that undermine the very sustainability goals the energy transition is designed to

advance. The absence of binding international frameworks for critical mineral governance analogous to the

Kimberley Process for conflict diamonds represents one of the most urgent gaps in contemporary sustainable

development governance.

Water, Food, and Hydro political Conflict

Water represents the resource dimension of contemporary geopolitics most directly linked to human survival

and welfare, and the one whose geopolitical salience is growing most rapidly under the combined pressures of

population growth, agricultural intensification, economic development, and hydrological disruption driven by

climate change. The inequitable distribution of freshwater resources, the transboundary character of most major

river systems and important aquifer formations, and the asymmetric power relationships between upstream and

downstream riparian states create a situation of structural hydropolitical vulnerability particularly acute for

water-scarce developing countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia (Zeitoun

et al., 2020). The Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam dispute in which Ethiopia's construction of a major

hydropower dam on the Blue Nile has generated acute political tensions with Egypt and Sudan over water

allocation is an exemplary illustration of the geopolitical dimensions of water insecurity: a developmental

infrastructure project necessary to Ethiopia's electrification and long-term economic growth produces zero-sum

distributional conflicts with downstream states for whom Nile water flows are constitutive of agricultural

viability and food security.

The geopolitics of food production constitutes an increasingly important dimension of resource sustainability.

Land grabbing the large-scale acquisition of agricultural land in developing countries by foreign state and

corporate actors has intensified significantly since the 2007–2008 food price crisis. This trend reflects the

convergence of food security anxieties in import-dependent countries, speculative investment in agricultural

commodities, and growing demand for biofuel feedstocks (Büscher & Fletcher, 2020; Hickel, 2021). The

displacement of smallholder communities from productive agricultural land, the reorientation of domestic food

production toward export markets, and the diminution of national food sovereignty represent direct threats to

SDG 2 (Zero Hunger) and SDG 1 (No Poverty). The absence of effective multilateral governance frameworks

capable of regulating foreign land acquisition in the interests of food sovereignty and ecological sustainability

reflects the same governance gap that characterises water resource management: the failure of the territorial state

system to govern resources whose developmental significance exceeds the capacity of any single sovereign

authority to protect (Zeitoun et al., 2020; Flint, 2022).

Case Study: The Mekong River Basin: Upstream Dams and Downstream Livelihoods

The Mekong River, flowing from the Tibetan Plateau through China's Yunnan Province, Myanmar, Laos,

Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, supports one of the world's largest freshwater fisheries and the food security

of an estimated 60–70 million people in its lower basin. Since the 1990s, China has constructed 11 mainstream

dams on the upper Mekong (Lancang), and Laos has proceeded with a further eight mainstream dams in the

lower basin, generating acute tensions with downstream Cambodia and Vietnam over water flow, sediment

transport, and fisheries health.

The environmental consequences are measurable and severe. The Mekong River Commission (MRC) an

intergovernmental body established by Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam in 1995, with China and

Myanmar as dialogue partners has documented significant reductions in the Mekong's sediment load (estimated

at 50–75% since the 1990s), reduced wet-season water flows, and disruption of the annual flood pulse on which

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the Tonle Sap Lake fishery in Cambodia depends. The Tonle Sap fishery, producing an estimated 500,000 tonnes

of fish annually, forms the primary protein source for over 15 million Cambodians.

The Mekong case is analytically important for several reasons. First, it illustrates how upstream-downstream

power asymmetries, amplified by China's absence from the MRC's formal governance framework, impede

effective transboundary water management. Second, it demonstrates the inadequacy of voluntary

intergovernmental mechanisms the MRC lacks binding enforcement powers when confronted with the scale of

infrastructure investment driven by national energy security priorities. Third, it shows how the developmental

aspirations of upstream states (Laos seeks to become the 'battery of Southeast Asia' through hydropower exports)

directly compromise the food security and livelihoods of downstream populations, generating zero-sum

distributional conflicts that map directly onto SDG 2, SDG 6, SDG 14, and SDG 16.

SDG Linkages

SDG 2 (Zero Hunger): Land grabbing, upstream dam construction, and hydropolitical conflict directly

undermine food security across developing regions.

SDG 6 (Clean Water and Sanitation): Transboundary water governance failures compromise access to safe water

and the freshwater ecosystem services on which rural livelihoods depend.

SDG 14 and 15 (Life Below Water and on Land): Resource extraction pressures driven by geopolitical

competition consistently override ecological governance frameworks designed to protect biodiversity.

The SDGs in Geopolitical Context

The seventeen SDGs adopted in 2015, together with their 169 corresponding targets and 231 unique indicators,

constitute the most detailed and ambitious articulation of the sustainable development agenda in the history of

international governance. The universality of the 2030 Agenda which extends to all states without reference to

income level and recognises the interdependence of economic, social, and environmental dimensions of

development represents a conceptual advance over the Millennium Development Goals it succeeded (United

Nations, 2022). However, the universality and ambition of the SDG framework exists in profound tension with

the geopolitical environment within which it is expected to be realised. The 2022 SDG Progress Report indicated

that the world was significantly off-track on most goal areas, with progress on many indicators having reversed

in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the disruption of the Ukraine conflict on food and energy markets, and

the intensification of climate-related extreme weather events.

The geopolitical dimensions of SDG underperformance are multiple and mutually reinforcing. SDG 1 (No

Poverty) is directly undermined by structural inequalities in global economic governance that limit developing

country access to the fiscal resources and policy space necessary for effective social protection systems

(Gallagher & Kozul-Wright, 2022; Hickel, 2021). SDG 13 (Climate Action) is compromised by the inability of

great-power geopolitical competition to deliver the cooperative emissions reduction commitments and climate

finance flows that scientific assessment has shown to be necessary — an inability rooted in the structural

asymmetries of power and competitive interstate logics analysed in preceding sections (Okereke, 2021; Burchill

et al., 2022). SDG 14 and 15 (Life Below Water and on Land) are impeded by the pressures of resource extraction

generated by geopolitical competition over fossil fuels, critical minerals, and agricultural commodities that

systematically override ecological governance frameworks. SDG 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions) is

directly undermined by territorial conflicts, resource wars, and governance crises generated by geopolitical

competition, particularly in resource-rich regions of the Global South where weak institutional capacity and high

levels of external resource competition combine to produce chronic conflict and instability (Klare, 2019; Flint,

2022).

Only 15% of SDG targets on track for 2030 (UN SDG Report, 2023)

~685 million people without electricity access (IEA, 2023)

Global SDG progress (2023)

SDG 7 energy access gap

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Approximately USD 4–6 trillion/year needed; current flows: ~USD 630

SDG 13 climate finance gap

billion

~783 million people facing chronic hunger rising after COVID-19

SDG 2 hunger (2022)

Over 110 million forcibly displaced globally record high (UNHCR, 2023)

SDG 16 conflict displacement

The specific case of SDG 7 provision of access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy illustrates

with particular clarity the geopolitical complexity of SDG implementation. Approximately 685 million people

worldwide lack access to electricity, with the overwhelming majority in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The

geopolitical barriers to achieving SDG 7 are multiple and structural: intellectual property regimes governing

clean technology limit access by developing country firms; private sector finance for international energy

investment favours commercially attractive grid-connected systems while underserving rural and peri-urban

communities with the lowest existing energy access; and the competitive dynamics of the global green energy

industry concentrate manufacturing capacity and supply chain control in the advanced economies and China,

limiting the scope for developing countries to build domestic clean energy industries (Gallagher & Kozul-

Wright, 2022).

SDG 17 (Partnerships for the Goals) the meta-goal whose achievement is a precondition for all others most

acutely reflects the geopolitical constraints of the international system. The commitments embedded in SDG 17,

including climate finance, technology transfer, capacity building, debt sustainability, and policy coherence, are

precisely the structural reforms in international governance that this article has argued are necessary for

sustainable development to be achievable within a geopolitically realistic framework. The consistent failure to

honour such commitments evident in the persistent gap between the USD 100 billion annual climate finance

pledge made at Copenhagen in 2009 and the finance actually mobilised reflects the structural power dynamics

and competitive logics of the geopolitical order. The analytical implication is not that the SDG framework is

misconceived, but that it rests on political assumptions about the character of the international environment that

are inconsistent with geopolitical realities and that making the SDG framework effective requires not only

technical interventions in specific goal areas but a broader political project of reforming the geopolitical

environment itself (Scholte et al., 2021; Okereke, 2021).

SDG Linkages

SDG 17 (Partnerships for the Goals): The meta-goal whose fulfilment requires structural reform of the

international financial architecture, binding technology transfer mechanisms, and coherent alignment of trade,

investment, and finance policies with sustainability commitments.

SDG 1 and 10 (No Poverty; Reduced Inequalities): Structural power asymmetries in global governance directly

reproduce the poverty traps and inequalities these goals seek to eliminate.

SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth): Debt service obligations and IMF conditionality constrain the

fiscal space developing countries need to invest in the productive transformation that decent work requires.

Regional Dimensions: Africa as a Geopolitical and Developmental Crucible

Africa presents the starkest and analytically most acute illustration of the structural tensions between geopolitics

and sustainable development. The continent holds approximately 30% of the world's mineral reserves including

the vast majority of global cobalt and substantial shares of lithium, manganese, platinum group metals, and

uranium; contains 14 of the world's 25 major transboundary river basins; hosts the largest tropical forest system

in the Congo Basin; and is projected to experience the most severe climate change impacts and the most rapid

population growth of any world region in coming decades (Kalantzakos, 2020; United Nations, 2022). These

characteristics make Africa simultaneously the region with the most to gain from a geopolitics oriented toward

sustainable development, and the region most exposed to the costs of a geopolitics oriented toward competitive

resource extraction and strategic competition.

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The intensification of great-power competition in Africa embodied in the rising military presence of the United

States and France in the Sahel, expanding Chinese infrastructure investment through the BRI, the involvement

of Russia's Wagner Group as a security provider in exchange for mining concessions across the Sahel and Central

Africa, and Gulf state engagement in the Horn of Africa has created a geopolitical context in which African

countries are increasingly the objects rather than the subjects of strategic calculation (Flint, 2022; Klare, 2019).

The governance consequences are substantially adverse from a sustainable development standpoint: the

entrenchment of security partnerships that prioritise regime stability over accountability; the proliferation of

extractive resource concessions generating export revenues and elite rents without developmental linkages; and

the displacement of national developmental planning by the strategic priorities of external powers whose

interests in African stability are conceived primarily in terms of resource access and security rather than the

long-term welfare of African populations.

Case Study: The Sahel: Ecological Stress, Geopolitical Competition, and Compounding Crises

The Sahel region encompassing Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Chad, Mauritania, and northern Nigeria illustrates

with exceptional clarity the causal links between ecological stress, governance fragility, geopolitical

competition, and the collapse of sustainable development prospects. The region has experienced some of the

world's fastest warming rates approximately 1.5 times the global average with the southward advance of the

Sahara, declining and increasingly erratic rainfall, and intensifying heat extremes creating conditions of resource

scarcity, livelihood insecurity, and state fragility that have been systematically exploited by extremist

organisations including Jama'at Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin (JNIM) and the Islamic State in the Greater

Sahara (ISGS).

Between 2012 and 2023, the Sahel experienced a cascade of coups d'état Mali (2020, 2021), Guinea (2021),

Burkina Faso (2022), Niger (2023), Gabon (2023) driven in significant part by public disillusionment with

governance failures to address the basic security and developmental needs of rural populations. The French

military counter-terrorism operation, Operation Barkhane (2014–2022), focused overwhelmingly on security

objectives while generating governance grievances through civilian casualties and allegations of supporting

incumbent regimes. The subsequent replacement of French forces by Russian Wagner Group contractors in Mali

and Burkina Faso did not represent a developmental break from this militarised logic but its continuity under

different management substituting Russian strategic and commercial interests for French ones, while leaving

unaddressed the structural developmental needs of Sahelian populations.

Key environmental indicators capture the scale of the challenge: the Lake Chad Basin has shrunk by

approximately 90% since the 1960s, from 25,000 km² to 2,500 km², due to the combined pressures of climate

change, population growth, and upstream irrigation; the Sahel has lost an estimated 3.8 million km² of productive

land to desertification (UNCCD); and food insecurity affects over 27 million people across the region as of 2023

(WFP). These ecological realities directly undermine SDG 2 (Zero Hunger), SDG 13 (Climate Action), SDG 15

(Life on Land), and SDG 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions), illustrating how ecological collapse and

geopolitical neglect interact to produce cascading development failures.

The African Union's Agenda 2063 and the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) represent important

if structurally constrained assertions of African developmental agency within the existing geopolitical order. The

AfCFTA, which entered into operation in 2021, holds the potential to create a continental market of 1.4 billion

people with a combined GDP exceeding USD 3 trillion. If successfully implemented, it could shift African

countries from a position of individual powerlessness in bilateral resource and trade negotiations toward a

position of collective strategic weight capable of dictating terms more favourable to sustainable development

(Gallagher & Kozul-Wright, 2022). However, realising AfCFTA's developmental potential requires not only the

elimination of formal trade barriers but substantive investment in infrastructure deficits, regulatory

harmonisation, and regional value chain development all of which require the sustained and equitable external

financial support that has consistently failed to materialise in the current geopolitical order.

Regional Institutions, Civil Society, and Local Communities in Sustainable Resource Governance

A comprehensive analysis of the geopolitics of sustainable development cannot confine itself to the interactions

of state actors and international financial institutions. Regional institutions, civil society organisations, and local

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communities constitute indispensable yet systematically undervalued dimensions of sustainable resource

governance actors whose proximity to affected populations, contextual knowledge, and accountability

relationships give them both distinctive roles and distinctive vulnerabilities in the geopolitical environment.

Regional Institutions as Governance Intermediaries

Regional intergovernmental institutions occupy a structurally significant intermediary position in the geopolitics

of sustainable development, operating between the national state and the global multilateral system. The African

Union, through its African Climate Change Strategy and the Great Green Wall Initiative an ambitious

programme to restore 100 million hectares of degraded land across the Sahara-Sahel region has sought to

construct regional frameworks for ecological governance that transcend the capacity of individual member

states. The Great Green Wall, endorsed by 21 Sahelian and Sudanian states, represents a regional institutional

response to desertification that integrates restoration, food security, and community livelihoods directly

addressing SDG 2, SDG 13, and SDG 15. As of 2023, approximately 18 million hectares have been restored,

against a 2030 target of 100 million hectares (UNCCD, 2023).

In Southeast Asia, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has developed regional environmental

governance frameworks including the ASEAN Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution (2002) and the

ASEAN Biodiversity Strategy. However, ASEAN's consensus-based decision-making model and its

foundational principle of non-interference in member state affairs substantially limit the enforcement capacity

of these frameworks, as demonstrated by the persistent recurrence of transboundary haze from Indonesian

peatland fires despite the 2002 Agreement. The contrast between the ASEAN model and the European Union's

more supranationally enforceable environmental regulatory frameworks including the EU Biodiversity Strategy,

the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, and the EU Deforestation Regulation illustrates how the depth of

regional institutional integration shapes the effectiveness of sustainable resource governance.

In Latin America, the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organisation (ACTO) uniting the eight Amazonian states has

provided a regional institutional framework for Amazon governance, though its effectiveness has been severely

constrained by the divergent domestic political trajectories of member states. The contrast between the Bolsonaro

administration's (2019–2022) rollback of Amazon protection in Brazil under which deforestation reached a 15-

year high of over 11,000 km² in 2021 and the Lula administration's subsequent commitment to achieving zero

Amazon deforestation by 2030 illustrates how regional governance frameworks are ultimately conditioned by

domestic political dynamics shaped by broader geopolitical pressures including trade relationships, commodity

price cycles, and access to international capital markets.

Dimension

African Union (AU)

European Union (EU)

Weak;

sanctions capacity

consensus-based;

limited Strong; legally binding regulations; carbon

border mechanisms

Enforcement power

African Climate Change Strategy; EU Green Deal; Fit for 55; Carbon Border

Climate governance

Great Green Wall

Adjustment

Limited;

climate finance

dependent

on

external EUR 1 trillion Green Deal Investment Plan;

EIB climate mandate

Financial

instruments

National-level; ACTO in Amazon; EU Deforestation Regulation (2023); binds

weak enforcement supply chains globally

Deforestation

regulation

Agenda 2063 aligned with SDGs; European Green Deal formally integrated

implementation gap with SDG framework

SDG integration

Civil Society Organizations and Transnational Advocacy

Civil society organisations (CSOs) encompassing international NGOs, domestic advocacy groups, research

institutions, faith-based organisations, and transnational social movements constitute a critical layer of

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sustainable resource governance that both complements and challenges state-centric geopolitical frameworks.

CSOs have been instrumental in shaping the normative evolution of international environmental law and

sustainable development frameworks, from the civil society coalitions that mobilised around the 1992 Earth

Summit in Rio de Janeiro to the advocacy networks that secured the Loss and Damage mechanism at COP27 in

2022 a historic recognition that climate-vulnerable countries deserve compensation for climate impacts beyond

their adaptive capacity.

In the domain of extractive industry governance, transnational civil society campaigns have driven the

development of voluntary and regulatory frameworks including the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative

(EITI) which as of 2023 includes 57 member countries committed to disclosing oil, gas, and mining revenues

and the Publish What You Pay coalition. These initiatives have created accountability mechanisms that, while

lacking the enforcement power of binding international law, have generated significant progress in fiscal

transparency in resource-rich developing countries. However, the effective implementation of transparency

frameworks is persistently constrained by the geopolitical interests of major corporations and capital-exporting

states whose governments resist binding international due diligence requirements that would impose costs on

their corporate sectors.

The transnational environmental justice movement, including organisations such as Friends of the Earth

International, La Via Campesina (the global peasant farmer network, representing approximately 200 million

small-scale farmers), and the Pacific Climate Warriors coalition, has brought the lived experiences of frontline

community’s farmers, fishers, indigenous peoples, and climate-displaced populations into international policy

arenas dominated by state and corporate actors. La Via Campesina's advocacy for food sovereignty as an

alternative to the WTO's trade liberalisation model has achieved formal recognition in the UN Declaration on

the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (2018), establishing normative precedent for

community rights in agricultural governance that directly supports SDG 2 and SDG 10.

Local Communities and Indigenous Peoples as Resource Governance Actors

Local communities and indigenous peoples represent not merely the subjects of resource governance but its most

consequential and most frequently overlooked practitioners. Centuries-old community-based governance

systems for forests, fisheries, rangelands, and water resources have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in

sustaining ecological productivity precisely because they embed governance within the social relationships and

ecological knowledge of the communities most dependent on the resources concerned. The Nobel laureate Elinor

Ostrom's foundational research on the governance of common-pool resources demonstrated that community-

based governance, when embedded in appropriate institutional conditions, consistently outperforms both state

regulation and market privatization in sustaining resource productivity over long time horizons (Ostrom, 1990).

The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP, 2007) established the principle of free,

prior, and informed consent (FPIC) as the standard for decision-making about projects affecting indigenous

peoples' lands, territories, and resources. However, the practical implementation of FPIC in the context of critical

mineral extraction remains deeply inconsistent. In the DRC's cobalt belt, in the Lithium Triangle, and in rare

earth mining regions of Myanmar and China, indigenous and local community rights to meaningful consent are

routinely overridden by a combination of state sovereignty claims, corporate pressure, and the geopolitical

urgency attached to securing transition mineral supply chains. The tension between FPIC as a human rights norm

and the geopolitical imperative of securing critical minerals for the green energy transition represents one of the

most acute and unresolved ethical challenges in the contemporary politics of sustainability.

Community-based adaptation (CBA) initiatives locally designed and managed responses to climate change

impacts have demonstrated consistent effectiveness in building the livelihood resilience of rural communities in

climate-vulnerable regions, including the Sahel, South Asia, and Pacific island states. Programmes such as the

CGIAR's climate-smart agriculture initiatives and the International Fund for Agricultural Development's (IFAD)

community-led programmes have documented significant improvements in food security, ecosystem health, and

household income in communities that receive support for locally-driven adaptation. However, international

climate finance flows remain heavily concentrated in large infrastructure projects and financial instruments

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legible to international capital markets, systematically underserving the community-scale initiatives that

evidence suggests are among the most cost-effective investments in sustainable development.

SDG Linkages

SDG 5 (Gender Equality): Women's land rights and participation in resource governance are both key

determinants of sustainable resource management outcomes and targets of SDG 5 recognising that gender justice

and ecological sustainability are structurally linked.

SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities) and SDG 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions): The effective inclusion of

civil society and local communities in resource governance is both an SDG 16 institutional quality indicator and

a prerequisite for the equitable distribution of resource benefits that SDG 10 demands.

SDG 15 (Life on Land): Community-based conservation models and indigenous resource governance systems

are among the most evidence-supported mechanisms for achieving SDG 15's biodiversity and land restoration

targets.

Toward a Sustainable Geopolitics

The analysis developed in this article points toward a set of propositions for what might be called a sustainable

geopolitics: an analytical and normative framework that reconceptualises the relationship between geographic

space, political power, and natural resources around the imperative of collective ecological sustainability rather

than the competitive logic of national territorial advantage. This reconceptualisation is not merely a normative

aspiration but an analytical imperative, grounded in the recognition that the geopolitical order as currently

constituted is producing ecological outcomes including anthropogenic climate change, mass biodiversity loss,

and the disruption of planetary biogeochemical cycles that constitute existential threats to the conditions upon

which all human development depends (Dalby, 2020; Büscher & Fletcher, 2020).

The first proposition concerns power: achieving sustainable development requires a deliberate redistribution of

structural power in global governance toward the developing countries that suffer most from unsustainable

development and have least influence over the rules and institutions governing the global economy and

environment. This redistribution involves concrete institutional reforms rebalancing voting shares in

international financial institutions, establishing automatic and predictable climate finance flows independent of

annual pledge cycles, reforming intellectual property regimes to enable developing country access to clean

technologies, and establishing multilateral debt restructuring mechanisms capable of preventing the debt crises

that force developing country governments to prioritise debt service over developmental investment (Gallagher

& Kozul-Wright, 2022; Hickel, 2021; Okereke, 2021). These reforms represent not charity but justice: the

recognition that the structural power advantages of the Global North have been developed, in part, at the expense

of the developmental potential of the Global South, and that sustainable development at the global scale requires

addressing rather than perpetuating this structural inequality.

The second proposition concerns space: the governance of global commons must be redesigned around

principles of collective ecological responsibility rather than national competitive advantage, with institutional

frameworks capable of managing the transboundary ecological processes that the Westphalian state system was

not designed to govern. This includes strengthening the institutional capacity and enforcement mechanisms of

multilateral environmental agreements, devising new governance structures for the global ocean and the

cryosphere, and establishing accountability mechanisms to address states whose domestic resource extraction

decisions generate transboundary ecological harm (Scholte et al., 2021; Burchill et al., 2022).

The third proposition concerns resources: the shift to a sustainable global economy requires governing the

extraction and processing of critical resources in ways that distribute developmental benefits equitably, limit

ecological damage, and ensure that the communities and countries on whose territories extraction takes place

capture sufficient value to fund their own developmental and ecological priorities. This calls for binding

international frameworks for critical mineral governance; the reform of bilateral investment treaty networks to

enhance host country regulatory powers; and the creation of mandatory environmental and social due diligence

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requirements for multinational corporations in resource extraction sectors (Kalantzakos, 2020; Büscher &

Fletcher, 2020).

A fourth proposition addresses the roles of regional institutions, civil society, and local communities in

sustainable geopolitics: an effective sustainable geopolitics must move beyond a state-centric analytical

framework to recognise these actors as constitutive elements of sustainable resource governance. This

recognition requires designing international governance frameworks that create space for civil society

participation in decision-making, protect the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities through binding

FPIC mechanisms, and channel adequate financial resources to community-based adaptation and conservation

initiatives. Regional institutions such as the African Union and ASEAN must be supported — through adequate

technical and financial capacity — to develop enforceable regional environmental governance frameworks that

complement and reinforce global multilateral agreements. The evidence from community-based natural resource

management, indigenous territorial governance, and civil society advocacy consistently demonstrates that

sustainable outcomes are most reliably produced when the communities most dependent on resources are most

meaningfully empowered in their governance.

A fifth proposition addresses the specific developmental imperatives of the Global South: a sustainable

geopolitics must recognise and actively support the right of developing countries to pursue nationally determined

development paths that prioritise the wellbeing of their populations and the integrity of their natural endowments

including development paths that deviate from the market-liberal model historically imposed by structural

power. Food sovereignty, resource-based industrialisation strategies, and heterodox macroeconomic policies that

prioritise social protection and ecological investment over fiscal austerity must be accorded legitimacy within

international governance frameworks rather than being systematically constrained by conditionality mechanisms

that serve the interests of dominant states and creditors (Büscher & Fletcher, 2020; Hickel, 2021).

CONCLUSION

This article has examined the relationship between geopolitics and sustainable development through three

analytical lenses the distribution and exercise of power in the international system, the contestation and

governance of geographic space, and the competition for control over natural resources and has further analysed

the roles of regional institutions, civil society, and local communities as actors in sustainable resource

governance. It has demonstrated that these dimensions of geopolitics are not secondary complications to the

sustainable development agenda but its structural context, fundamentally determining what is possible, at what

pace, and for whom.

The article's analytical contribution lies in its insistence that geopolitics and sustainable development must be

analysed in constitutive relationship to each other rather than as parallel fields of scholarly inquiry. The SDG

framework, for all its ambition and conceptual sophistication, cannot be delivered in a geopolitical context

characterised by structural inequality, great-power competition, and a logic of national territorial advantage that

systematically overrides collective ecological responsibility. Conversely, geopolitical analysis that is blind to

ecological and developmental dimensions is analytically impoverished and practically inadequate to the

challenges of the Anthropocene. The integration of critical geopolitics, environmental geopolitics, political

ecology, development studies, and perspectives on civil society and community governance into a coherent

analytical framework guided by the normative imperative of sustainability and anchored in structural geopolitical

realities is the scholarly task this article has sought to advance.

The case studies presented throughout the article from DRC cobalt to Bolivian lithium, from the South China

Sea to the Mekong basin, from the Sahel crisis to Norway's sovereign wealth governance model illustrate how

the structural dynamics of geopolitical power, spatial contestation, and resource competition manifest in concrete

developmental and ecological realities. The comparative analysis of developed and developing country

experiences reveals the depth of the governance asymmetries that the SDG framework must confront, and the

statistical data integrated throughout the article grounds these theoretical claims in measurable terms. Together,

these empirical materials support a consistent finding: that the costs of geopolitical dysfunction in the domains

of power, space, and resources are disproportionately borne by the most vulnerable countries and communities

those least responsible for creating the structural conditions from which they suffer most.

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The normative argument of this article is that a reconceptualised sustainable geopolitics oriented toward the

collective reproduction of planetary conditions upon which all human development depends, rather than the

competitive accumulation of national territorial advantage is not merely desirable but increasingly necessary.

The compounding crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, resource scarcity, and developmental inequality

are generating geopolitical instabilities that will, if unaddressed, make the achievement of sustainable

development more rather than less difficult. The inclusion of regional institutions, civil society organisations,

and local communities as recognised and resourced actors in this reconceptualised geopolitical framework is not

a supplementary consideration but a structural imperative: the evidence consistently shows that sustainable

outcomes in resource governance, climate adaptation, and ecological conservation are most reliably produced

when the communities most affected are most meaningfully empowered.

The restructuring of geopolitics in the service of sustainability is among the most pressing intellectual and

political challenges facing scholars and practitioners of international affairs in the coming decades. It requires

the analytical work of mapping the links between geopolitical structure and developmental outcome a task this

article has sought to advance. It demands the normative work of articulating a conception of national interest

that encompasses the long-term sustainability of the planet. It requires the institutional work of establishing

multilateral governance frameworks capable of managing great-power competition, governing global commons,

and ensuring the equitable distribution of resource wealth. And it requires recognising that these institutional

frameworks will only be durable if they are anchored in the participation, knowledge, and rights of the regional

institutions, civil society actors, and local communities who must ultimately implement and legitimise them.

The scholarly task is to map this terrain with the rigour and honesty the stakes demand; the political task is to

act with the urgency that a planet in the grip of compounding ecological and developmental stress requires.

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