Accelerating Critical Raw Materials Extraction: A Frame Analysis of Community Resistance to Strategic Mining Projects in Kiruna, Swedish Sápmi

Sammanfattning

The EU's Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA) fast-tracks permitting for strategic projects, but how affected communities respond to acceleration is uncertain. This study investigates local community resistance to two strategic mining projects in Kiruna municipality, northern Sweden: LKAB’s Per Geijer rare earth elements project and Talga’s Nunasvaara graphite project. The study investigates how local resistance actors evaluate accelerated mining permitting, challenge urgency narratives, and articulate alternative pathways for sustainability transitions. Drawing on political ecology and a place-based frame analysis, the study analyses 15 qualitative interviews with local resistance actors, including Sámi reindeer owners, municipal actors, environmental organisations, and Kiruna-Vittangi residents. The findings show that temporal pressure is so far experienced as political pressure through institutional centralisation and government’s overruling of local decisions, rather than shortened timelines in practice. Shortened timeframes are not seen as compatible with Swedish mining permitting, meaningful stakeholder consultation, or comprehensive environmental assessment. Local actors anticipated it concentrating decision-making power toward state and industry and pre-determining strategic projects as overriding public interest. A novel finding is a lack of transparency around strategic project designation, for both affected stakeholders and the official contact point. Local resistance reflected three alternative pathways: governance-centred just transition, place-based socio-ecological protection, and post-extractivist transformation. Actors challenge green extractivism not by rejecting decarbonisation, but by contesting whether expansive CRM extraction constitutes a genuine sustainability transition.