Braucher, C. & Armiero, M., (2026) “Lithium supply chain metabolism, a conflict-based analysis”, Journal of Political Ecology 33(1): 8782.

This article examines the impacts of the energy transition industry from an environmental justice perspective, proposing to understand supply chain metabolism through environmental conflicts and enhancing socio-metabolic analysis. By revisiting the concept of social metabolism, we explore its evolution and relevance in the current context of global supply chains analysis. Historically, this approach provides tools to understand the flow of energy and materials sustaining societies. We argue that, within the context of the contemporary energy transition in the Global North, our challenge as critical scholars is to examine whether and how the supply chain, as a capitalist dispositif, exacerbates environmental and social injustices across multi-scalar geographies. Situating our research within the emerging political ecology scholarship on supply chain metabolism and its links to global power dynamics, our empirical contribution focuses on the lithium supply chain, a critical component of the energy transition sector. While metabolic analysis primarily focuses on the flow of energy and materials, we use data from the Environmental Justice Atlas (EJAtlas) to trace the dynamics of resistance and conflict along the supply chain, uncovering the socio-environmental injustices embedded within it. We employ a hybrid methodology (using qualitative data for quantitative description) to analyze the structural mechanisms of exclusion that underpin injustice along lithium supply chains.