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1. Building a Sustainable Electric Vehicle Battery Supply Chain: Frequently Asked Questions

Author:
Patrick Heller, Ethan Elkind, and Ted Lamm
Publication Date:
04-2020
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Natural Resource Governance Institute
Abstract:
The global transition from fossil fuel-powered vehicles to electric vehicles (EVs) will require the production of hundreds of millions of batteries. The need for such a massive deployment raises questions from the general public and critics alike about the sustainability of the battery supply chain, from mining impacts to vehicle carbon emissions. Growing demand for the mineral inputs for battery production can provide an opportunity for mineral-rich countries to generate fiscal revenues and other economic opportunities. But where extraction takes place in countries with weak governance, the benefits expected by citizens and leaders may not materialize; in some cases extraction might even exacerbate corruption, human rights abuses and environmental risks. Many EV proponents and suppliers are aware that supply chain governance problems pose a challenge to the evolution of the EV industry, but outstanding questions remain about how these challenges materialize. This brief, jointly published by UC Berkeley School of Law’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment (CLEE) and the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI) provides basic information on the EV battery supply chain and key battery minerals, such as cobalt and lithium, and addresses the following questions: What does the supply chain for EV batteries comprise? How do carbon emissions from EVs compare to traditional internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles? What are the most significant challenges in managing the mineral extraction necessary for the EV supply chain, and what sustainability and human rights initiatives apply?
Topic:
Civil Society, Corruption, Government, Human Rights, Natural Resources, Governance, Regulation, Legislation, and Supply Chains
Political Geography:
Global Focus

2. Grassroots Reform in the Global South: A Literature Review on Grassroots Reform

Author:
Patrick Heller, Andrew Schrank, Anindita Adhikari, Benjamin Bradlow, Rehan Jamil, Kristine Li, Chantel Pheiffer, and Marcus Walton
Publication Date:
09-2017
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Institute of International Education
Abstract:
In 2016, USAID’s Center of Excellence on Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance launched its Learning Agenda—a set of research questions designed to address the issues that confront staff in USAID field offices working on the intersection of development and democracy, human rights, and governance. This literature review—produced by a team of sociologists and political scientists—synthesizes scholarship from diverse research traditions on the following Learning Agenda question: How and when does grassroots reform scale up? When citizen participation has led to local reforms in a particular sector (e.g., health), what processes lead to these reforms’ influencing the regional or national levels of that sector (e.g., citizen groups monitoring medicine supplies in local clinics leads eventually to pharmaceutical procurement reform in the Ministry of Health)? The report itself is divided into four principal sections: Section 1 outlines the context for the report by discussing the importance of grassroots reform, defining key terms, and describing its methodology. Section 2 documents the experiences of different regions with an eye toward intra-regional comparisons. Section 3 distills two types of lessons from the regional experiences: relatively abstract lessons of broad relevance and relatively precise lessons of less general relevance. Section 4 discusses the translation of the authors’ findings into actionable lessons and concludes by discussing the limits to their knowledge base, pending research questions, and methodological impediments to their resolution.
Topic:
Human Rights, Reform, Democracy, and USAID
Political Geography:
United States of America and Global South