The course explores global resources, examining how they are socially constructed, circulated, and used in a globalized world. It situates these dynamics within the context of the three major global environmental changes (climate change, biodiversity loss, and transformations in land use and resource systems) and planetary boundaries to further understand the role of ‘resources’ within transition pathways. Particular attention is paid to emerging or reinforcing geopolitical tensions surrounding security of supply, sovereignty, and the (re)territorialisation of resources, with a specific focus on raw materials essential to industry and technological innovation, questioning distance regimes between resources producing and consuming countries around the world.
The transition toward low-carbon societies is approached as a complex and ongoing process, shaped by diverse socio-technical practices and resources that reconfigure territories, value chains, and power relations. The course foregrounds fundamental questions of resource access, distribution, responsibility, and environmental justice. Adopting an integrated “nexus” perspective, it highlights the interdependencies among resources (e.g., water, energy, mining, and food systems), their transformations across the life cycle, and the socio-spatial inequalities they may produce or reinforce.
Structured progressively, the course begins by unpacking the very notion of “resource” and introducing integrated analytical frameworks. It then examines the challenge of ensuring a just access to and allocation of resources in a constrained world, before turning to the material politics of everyday infrastructural needs, from the global to the local scale. Subsequent sessions address key notions such as mining renewal, circular economy, critical materials, water, biodiversity and land access. To this aim, the course explores international trade and investment regimes, global supply chains, extractive futures, land governance, biodiversity commodification, commons and local knowledge. Drawing on international scholarship, contemporary research, including guest lectures presenting recent collective work and diverse case studies, the course equips students to analyse how global resource dynamics interact with territories and societies across scales, from international negotiations to local contexts. Designed for engineers, it mobilizes approaches from the Social Sciences and Humanities to foster critical,reflexive, and multi-scalar engagement with socio-technical and environmental challenges.
