Making participation count: meaningful community engagement in the energy transition
Nearly half of the world’s transition-mineral projects are located on or near Indigenous or community lands, and renewable energy infrastructure increasingly overlaps with sensitive ecosystems and territories. As demand for critical minerals and clean energy projects accelerates, communities are often the first to face challenges and risks, and the ones who live with the long-term impacts when projects end, fail or are poorly governed. This Paper responds to that imbalance by setting out how participation, transparency, and consent must be built into every stage of the project lifecycle.
Drawing on Transparency International Australia’s Accountable Mining and Accountable Infrastructure Programmes, the Paper provides information on measures, examples and frameworks for governments, companies, civil society, and communities to strengthen engagement across the renewable energy value chain. This includes both upstream activities (exploration, project development, and extraction, typically involving the mining sector) and downstream activities (processing, manufacturing, and distribution, typically connected to renewable infrastructure). In doing so, it connects responsible mineral supply with the standards needed for a just transition.
The Paper is structured around six interlinked areas that move from foundational principles to practical risks and safeguards. It first explains why communities are central to the transition and where participation should occur across mining and renewable energy infrastructure projects. It then examines risks that can undermine consultation, especially integrity and corruption risks, before defining what meaningful consultation is, why it matters, and the core principles that should guide it. Building on this, it sets out Free Prior Informed Consent (FPIC) as a rights-based standard and the conditions needed for consent to be voluntary, timely and informed. It then addresses inclusion and gender inequality as cross-cutting factors shaping participation, impacts, and accountability, and summarises the international frameworks that underpin access to information, participation, and remedy. The Paper concludes with practical, role-specific recommendations and further resources.