Two Models, One Same Paradox: Critical Minerals and Indigenous Self-determination in Sweden and Colombia

Written on 16 January 2026. Posted in News

BY LAURA GALVIS SANTACRUZ FOR INDIGENOUS DEBATES

In both countries, the international dispute over strategic resources impacts the territories. While redefining the boundaries of state power, this struggle places critical minerals at the centre of a longstanding tension: the expansion of national sovereignty in the face of the right to Indigenous self-determination.

The transition toward renewable energies is reconfiguring global governance frameworks, in line with the growing geopolitical demand for critical minerals. Copper, nickel, lithium, graphite, rare earths, and other strategic minerals have become indispensable to hyper-connectivity, artificial intelligence, electric mobility, and industrial reconversion, redrawing the boundaries between sovereignty, technology, and territory. This new extractive regime presents a historical continuity: the persistence of Indigenous territories as priority spaces for state intervention.

At the same time, it introduces a substantive transformation: mining is reconfigured as a function of sovereignty in the twenty-first century, integrated into policies of technological security, energy autonomy, and state positioning in a strained world economy. Thus, control over critical minerals becomes the capacity to define which development models are deemed legitimate and which are subordinated or discarded in the contemporary political economy, even when those resources lie in Indigenous territories with their own systems of self-determination.

The nature of this conflict goes beyond the historical extraction of minerals such as coal or gold. Although both were strategic resources, critical minerals sustain the architecture of our era: they enable digitalisation, military industries, the manufacture of batteries and semiconductors, and technological hegemony in a world marked by accelerated geopolitical tensions. Their control no longer defines wealth alone, but also a state’s capacity to impose its vision of the future, from national security to energy autonomy, from digital infrastructure to industrial competitiveness. A capacity that, frequently, finds legitimacy in the global discourse of the green transition, even when its aims respond to logics of power and security.

A Right to Be and to Will to Be

In Sweden, this priority is reflected in its adherence to the Sustainable Critical Minerals Alliance in June 2024. There,  the Government states that these resources are essential to “ensure a secure and sustainable supply of raw materials necessary for the green and digital transitions,” thereby reinforcing the security of European production chains. Meanwhile, in Colombia, through Resolution 1006 of 2023, the National Mining Agency updated the list of “strategic minerals,” linking their extraction to the energy transition, the commitments of the Paris Agreement, and reindustrialisation.

In both countries, extraction ceased to be a merely economic strategy and became a pillar of state security at a time when competition for critical minerals redefines global hierarchies and reconfigures the historical place of Indigenous territories as strategic spaces in global politics. This reconfiguration exposes a deep tension at the core of contemporary governance of natural resources and collective rights: the persistent conflict between the formal recognition of Indigenous peoples by the state and their struggle for substantive autonomy, the capacity to fully define their political status and freely exercise their economic, social, and cultural existence as peoples.

This dispute reframes self-determination not as a right merely inscribed in legal systems, but as a right to be and to will to be, a living principle that confronts the limits of the state and the extractive logics that uphold it. The right to be is claimed from territory, memory, and resistance, and does not constitute a concession granted by the state. Its reclaiming compels a rethinking of self-determination not as a passive legal clause, but as an active political process to sustain life and governance, in contexts where violence takes diverse forms, from colonial dispossession to the technocratic logics of control and exclusion.

In this context, critical minerals exacerbate the decision-making asymmetry structuring the relationship between the state and Indigenous peoples. While state sovereignty over the subsoil expands through emergent normative languages, security of supply, climate urgency, and industrial competitiveness, Indigenous self-determination remains confined to procedural participation mechanisms, without binding capacity to contest the strategic orientation of development, even when their territories become central to the energy transition.

Between the Unitary State and Constitutional Pluralism

The way states manage the right to be reveals the extent to which self-determination is translated into, or diluted within, the administrative and legal frameworks regulating subsoil and territories. In Sweden and Colombia, two apparently opposed state philosophies (one rooted in European liberal administrative unity, the other in postcolonial constitutional pluralism) converge in what can be called a paradox of power in decision-making: the subsoil is conceived as a matter of national interest, allowing the recentralization of strategic decisions under the rhetoric of the public interest and collective destiny.

On the surface, these policies present a more inclusive governance model; in practice, they absorb Indigenous participation into normative frameworks that secure state supremacy over territory. Self-determination thus becomes an administered promise: a right recognised, or, in some cases, merely enunciated, but conditioned by the logics of development and the green transition, where the state again positions itself as arbiter of the possible.

The most recent reports of the Sámi Council, The State of Sápmi 01 and 02, show how Sweden embodies a contained version of the same paradox: a formalised Indigenous recognition within a state framework that guarantees cultural protection but denies territorial sovereignty. At its legal foundation, Sámi rights defined by the Reindeer Husbandry Act are functional rather than territorial: they allow the traditional use of land for reindeer herding but do not confer sovereignty or ownership over the subsoil. Although the Constitution recognises the Sámi people, this recognition is limited to cultural and administrative spheres, without granting territorial or jurisdictional rights. The absence of ratification of ILO Convention 169 reinforces that restriction.

Within this framework, the Sámi Consultation Act (2022) is an institutional step forward by establishing a duty for public authorities to engage with the Sámi people; however, it does not require consent and excludes private actors. For its part, the Sámi Parliament (Sametinget), subordinated to the Government, retains consultative functions without decision-making power over natural resources. In turn, the Minerals Act (1991) and the Forestry Act (1979) provide procedural participation mechanisms, but do not create a formal obligation to consult nor rest on consent, while the Environmental Code (1998) limits protection to ecological aspects, sidelining the cultural, social, and spiritual dimensions of territory. In this way, the state recognises the Sámi as a political interlocutor, yet self-determination persists within the boundaries of the state.

Colombia: a Governance Framework that Blends Coercion, Litigation, and Administration

In Colombia, this paradox takes its most exposed and disputed form. Whereas in Sweden administrative integration neutralises self-determination within a framework of cultural recognition, in Colombia legal pluralism unfolds amid institutional fragmentation and the historical weight of armed conflict. Unlike Sweden, Colombia is home to 115 Indigenous peoples officially recognised, many of which overlap with areas of extraction and environmental conservation, thereby intensifying the challenges of territorial management and the application of law, especially regarding the exercise of autonomy and special Indigenous jurisdiction.

From a normative perspective, the 1991 Constitution recognised Indigenous jurisdiction (Article 246), collective ownership (Articles 329 and 330), and the duty of prior consultation under ILO Convention 169 (Law 21 of 1991). Likewise, the Constitutional Court established that prior consent is mandatory when a project, activity or measure implies displacement, storage of toxic materials, or a threat of physical or cultural extinction (Decision SU-123 of 2018). Nevertheless, the effectiveness of this framework depends almost entirely on litigation; the tutela action (a constitutional mechanism for the protection of fundamental rights in Colombia) has become the main enforcement tool, and the Court acts as arbiter in the face of administrative inertia and weak institutional coordination.

The management of mining concessions and environmental licenses reflects this fragmentation: the National Mining Agency grants and oversees mining concessions, while the National Environmental Licensing Authority and the Regional Autonomous Corporations conduct environmental evaluation without effective articulation. Although the Court, in Decision T-129 of 2011, ordered that prior consultation must begin at the planning stage, ordinary regulations usually limit it to the environmental licensing procedure, when projects are already advanced, reducing the right to an administrative requirement.

In this context, violence, heir to a long history of disputes over land and territorial control, operates as a mechanism of power intertwining economic, political, and armed interests, conditioning Indigenous autonomy. Thus, Colombian legal pluralism, though constitutionally robust, coexists with a governance regime that combines coercion, litigation, and administration, against which Indigenous peoples assert their autonomy as a persistent form of resistance.

Beyond the Decision-making Limit: Toward Reciprocal Governance

The contrast between Sweden and Colombia reveals not only two administrative models, but also two forms of relation among the state, Indigenous peoples, and territorial sovereignty. In Sweden, the institutional coherence of the state ensures its own stability, yet reduces recognition of the Sámi people to a matter managed by the administration rather than a principle of self-determination. In Colombia, the legal force of constitutional pluralism recognises substantive rights, but institutional fragmentation and the persistence of violence erode their effectiveness. Rights exist, yet their fulfilment depends on a state that operates between legal promise and political inertia.

In both contexts, the struggle over strategic resources redraws the limits of state power and places critical minerals at the centre of a persistent tension: the expansion of state sovereignty versus the containment of Indigenous self-determination. Therefore, beyond a normative debate, the central challenge lies in reconfiguring the governance of power in decision-making, so that the relationship between the state and Indigenous peoples is no longer subordinated to administration but grounded in the redistribution of sovereignty, thereby overcoming the paradox through which the discourse of recognition continues to constrain self-determination.

Laura Galvis Santacruz is a Colombian sociologist and a master’s student in International Development and Management at Lund University (Sweden). She has a decade of experience analysing territorial dynamics and socio-environmental conflicts in the mining and environmental sectors.

Cover photo: Arhuaco people in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. Photo: Alejandro Parellada

Tags: Indigenous Debates