Initiative Area

Minerals for Development

Our Motivating Challenge

Strategic mineral supply chains now sit at the center of global industrial policy and economic diplomacy. Governments, industries, and financial institutions are racing to expand these supply chains to meet the demands of the green transition, AI, and defense. Increasingly, these demands are being met in a context of transactional investment and aid flows, fragmenting supply chains, and geopolitical instability. In this context, the ambition of producer countries to convert mineral wealth into near-term domestic resource mobilization and long-term industrialization has become more urgent, more difficult, and essential to national development objectives.

However, information and analytical asymmetries – especially between governments, the private sector, and civil society – remain a serious barrier. Producer governments and coalitions stand to benefit from stronger capacity to design value capture and creation mechanisms and social investment strategies that can withstand market volatility and geopolitical shocks. Yet actionable knowledge for policymakers is scarce. Key challenges center around financing and investment strategies, institutional development, trade diversification, and commodity market uncertainty.

In partnership with the Carnegie Corporation of New York, JFI’s Minerals for Development Initiative is building this capacity, combining our capabilities and expertise in metals & mining, policy analysis, economic research, software development, and financial modeling. Our tools and research insights are designed to enable producer countries capture a greater share of the benefits from the extraction, trade, and use of resources critical to the energy and digital transitions. The scope and scale of our work vary according to the specific needs of our partners. They can include tailored, context-specific support — such as applying data-rich methodologies to identify and position local value chain investment opportunities — as well as systematic efforts, such as developing and applying fiscal regime modeling tools or advancing mineral market research to support more informed policy ambitions.

Our Capabilities

The Minerals for Development Initiative (MfD) combines our researchers’ expertise in metals and mining, economic research, financial modeling, software development, and policy analysis, with organization-wide expertise in developmental economics and macroeconomics. Through close research partnerships and collaborative development, our work bridges rigorous applied research with implementation and makes complex public finance and market design challenges more accessible to decision-makers.

Partner with Us

Our partners include policymakers at the national and subnational levels domestically and abroad, private investors, industry experts, and NGOs. If you’d like to hear more about partnering with us, please email us at [email protected]; we welcome questions and comments. MfD provides a combination of policy design, modeling, and direct assistance across primary areas of work.

Minerals for Development Contributors

Higher Education Finance

Eduard Nilaj

Fellow

Special Projects

Francis Tseng

Lead Developer

Chief Research Officer

Jerome Hodges

Minerals for Development

Jonah Allen

Vice President & Lead Researcher

Financing the Energy Transition

Madeline Craig-Scheckman

Fellow

Social Wealth

Paul Katz

Senior VP

Financing the Energy Transition

Shane Sethi

Research Fellow

Social Wealth and Financing the Energy Transition

Sina Sinai

Senior Research Associate

Strategy and Operations

Sunaina Pamudurthy

Fellow, Strategic Partnerships

Related Tools

Tooling

Mineral Market Dashboard

The dashboard benchmarks varying projections for transition-critical mineral market growth.

Tooling

Mining Fiscal Regime Simulator

Enables more informed and critical comparison of the varying tax and royalty pathways for producer country value capture from the mining sector.

Tooling

Transition Critical Minerals

This tool maps the high-level distribution of current and future mining production and potential royalty revenue globally through 2030.

Related Publication Series

Mineral Wealth and Electrification

The energy transition represents a significant opportunity for countries producing the materials critical to electrification. In this series, we look at eight such materials: aluminum, cobalt, copper, natural graphite, iron, lithium, manganese, and nickel. As demand for so-called “critical minerals” grows, producer countries must develop robust strategies for effective value capture to transform a temporary windfall into an opportunity to grow shared wealth and climb the value chain. Doing so demands both institutional capacity and political will.

Minerals-Based Industrial Policies in a Fragmenting World: Lessons from Indonesia and Australia

How do mineral-producing countries pursue industrial policy? The ways in which countries perceive, navigate, and capitalize on their mineral sectors have key implications for global supply chains, and strategic governance of critical minerals is essential to achieving equitable and secure decarbonization in a fragmenting global order. This series will explore strategic divergences between mineral-rich countries that are implementing mineral-based industrial policies, using Australia and Indonesia as case studies. Questions investigated will include: What types of policies are most common or preferred, and why? Which policies appear most effective in achieving national goals? How does each country’s domestic context shape its broader mineral governance framework? And how do trade and investment flows influence Australia and Indonesia positioning themselves in the global sphere?

Unpacking Mineral Markets

Decarbonization and development are driving up demand for critical minerals; the countries that produce these minerals have new opportunities to capture value both from mining and from more lucrative downstream activities. Yet mineral price volatility and overcapacity across the supply chain have put these ambitions to the test. The mix and scale of transition demand now and in the future, and the expectations behind them, will shape realized growth in market volumes, while prices, which are volatile and uncertain, will determine fiscal windfalls as well as the viability of projects both upstream and downstream. This series examines mineral market dynamics to ground more robust policy objectives aimed at lasting development outcomes.