Legibility, Power, and Bottlenecks: What the New Critical-Minerals Working Papers Reveal About Governance in the Energy Transition

Critical minerals policy has shifted from price/volume management to resilience and governance, but many debates still use commodity-market intuition. This paper synthesizes a 2024–early 2026 working-paper corpus and argues that outcomes are best understood as a coupled system: contracting and fiscal commitment devices shape investable surplus; refining and power chokepoints bind feasibility; enforcement creates diversion margins; measurement makes networks legible (and governable); and financial depth/tail risk constrains hedging and project finance. The corpus repeatedly shows heterogeneity is structural, not noise. Policy implications include refined-material stockpiles, feasible-set friend-shoring, diversion-aware due diligence, microdata exposure mapping, disciplined moonshot appraisal, and tail-regime stabilization tools.