Externalities, Complexity and Justice: Exploring the New Paradigm of ‘Deliberative Trade Policy’

Cleaning mineral supply chains? Political economies of exploitation and hidden costs of technical fixes

“…Some costs may not be obvious to audiences such as policy makers, but highly apparent to those bearing these, such as local producers losing market share as a result of more stringent environmental norms. However, extending beyond critiques of simply understanding externalities as 'market failures' (Herrmann-Pillath, 2017), our analysis of mineral supply schemes points to the at least partial intentionality in the invisibilization of these costs. Rather than seeing these costs as being hard to identify due to their intrinsic characteristics, we argue that hidden costs in these schemes are often concealed as their disclosure would expose the narrow and often biased rationality of these solutions, undermine their legitimacy, and consolidate claims for compensation or alternative solutions by cost-bearers.…”