Securing a just energy transition through transformative coalitions: the potential of Territorial Transformation Observatories in Peru’s Southern Mining Corridor Authors: Daniel Hernando - Project coordinator Jeanette Moreno - Director of Strategic Partnerships and Knowledge Management 1. Introduction: Critical minerals and the governance challenge Copper has become a critical mineral for the global energy transition due to its irreplaceable role in key technologies such as renewable energy systems, electric mobility, and the expansion and modernization of power grids. In this context, Peru occupies a strategic position as one of the world’s leading copper producers, making it a key supplier within global value chains that underpin decarbonization efforts. As a result, Peruvian copper represents not only a strategic asset for the energy transition, but also a critical testing ground for its social and territorial viability when governance challenges are not adequately addressed. It is within this broader context that the Southern Mining Corridor (SMC) in Peru has emerged as a particularly critical and conflict-prone territory associated with large-scale copper extraction. Concentrating some of the country’s most important mining operations, the corridor has also become a space of recurrent social unrest, where structural tensions between extractive activities, territorial livelihoods, and weak governance arrangements persist. Our first findings through qualitative data, dialogue mechanisms have increasingly taken on a transactional character. Negotiations are often activated under conditions of acute conflict and framed around immediate concessions, such as compensation, infrastructure commitments, or short-term benefit-sharing arrangements, without addressing underlying structural drivers related to land use, environmental impacts, social expectations, and territorial development. As a result, dialogue becomes less a space for collective problem-solving and more a tool for conflict containment. Therefore, the SMC illustrates how territorially embedded governance failures can undermine both social stability and increase the operational risks and uncertainties surrounding copper production in a context of global energy transition. In the SMC, the prevailing governance response to conflict has been organized around a familiar repertoire: multi-stakeholder dialogue tables, ad hoc compensation packages, and a narrow framing of issues through the triad of company-State-community relations. While these instruments can be useful for de-escalation and for addressing specific grievances, their recurrent deployment has also revealed important structural limitations. First, dialogue tables are frequently convened as crisis-response mechanisms rather than as stable, institutionalized platforms for territorial governance. Their agendas tend to be shaped by immediate conflict triggers, their continuity depends on political cycles and episodic mobilization, and their outcomes often lack enforceability, monitoring, and clear accountability arrangements across actors. Second, economic compensation and discrete development projects (whether delivered by companies or negotiated with state participation) often operate as substitutes for governance rather than complements to it. Third, the dominant project-centred, company–community governance frame tends to depoliticize and de-territorialize the problem. It concentrates practical 160
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