Governing critical mineral transitions: Democracy, delay, and the politics of lithium extraction in Ghana

New extractive production of ‘transition’ minerals in the Global South provides novel challenges – political, social and environmental – to states and societies with historical experience of colonial extraction. Governance of Ghana’s emergent lithium mining industry builds on its history of gold mining and oil and gas production, but lithium’s central role in green energy production is generating new social and environmental claims and contestations focused on how to ‘add value’ to lithium production. This article, in examining the interplay between the global/regional, national and local political spaces that are shaping this governance, provides new understandings of how national and local expectations for social beneficiation and ‘added value’ are unfolding in Ghana’s comparatively dynamic liberal democratic context. This analysis, drawing on interviews with government and company officials, as well as surveys of and interviews with communities affected by new lithium mining, shows how party political rivalries, limited and uneven community consultation, and diverse understandings of the potential benefits and costs of lithium extraction in southern Ghana led to a paralysis of mining production in 2023-25, frustrating the hopes of local communities and placing lithium mining at the centre of Ghanaian political life. In challenging conventional understandings of the inability of affected communities to shape extractive mining projects, the article finds that local community representatives played a significant role in the ratification by parliament of the Ewoyaa lithium mine agreement in March 2026.