attention around a given operation, while obscuring the broader territorial system in which mining is embedded: multi-level state agencies with uneven capacities; local governments with constrained legitimacy; competing land-use claims; regional economies shaped by informality; and heterogeneous community dynamics, including internal representation disputes and divergent expectations. From this perspective, the energy transition becomes a problem of territorial governance. It hinges on the capacity to coordinate diverse actors across scales, to produce and share credible information, to manage trade-offs between extractive activities and territorial livelihoods, and to establish rules and expectations that extend beyond short-term crisis management. When governance arrangements remain weak or reactive, technological progress and increased production can exacerbate conflict rather than resolve it, undermining social trust and threatening the long-term viability of mining operations that are critical to global climate goals. Thus, without governance frameworks that are territorially grounded and oriented toward transformation rather than containment, the promise of a just energy transition risks remaining disconnected from the realities of the territories that sustain it. In response to these limitations, this paper introduces the Territorial Transformation Observatory (OTT) not as a definitive solution, but as a governance hypothesis for addressing the structural challenges observed in the SMC. The OTT is conceived as an enabling platform that seeks to reconfigure how territorial problems are understood, discussed, and acted upon. Its central premise is that sustainable conflict management and long-term stability in critical mining territories depend on the existence of shared informational baselines, institutionalized and territorially grounded spaces for interaction that move beyond crisis-driven, transactional negotiation, and strengthened local capacities that allow actors to move beyond transactional engagement. 2. Transformative coalitions and territorial governance: a conceptual lens In territorially complex and conflict-prone contexts such as large-scale mining corridors, persistent governance failures have revealed the limits of transactional negotiation and fragmented coordination among actors. It is within these settings that the concept of transformative coalitions becomes analytically relevant. Transformative coalitions refer to structured alignments among diverse actors who, despite differing interests and positional power, converge around a shared diagnosis of territorial challenges and a forward-looking vision for change (Ciplet 2022; Köhler 2020). Unlike ad hoc alliances or temporary coordination mechanisms, such coalitions are defined by the combination of strategic power and embedded relations, which enables them to influence decision-making processes while remaining grounded in specific territorial contexts. Rather than emerging spontaneously, transformative coalitions are sustained through explicit and implicit rules of interaction that structure how actors engage, negotiate, and make collective decisions over time (Herzog et al. 2022). As several strands of the literature emphasize, these formal and informal rules play a central role in shaping collaboration, determining not only who participates, but also how authority, responsibilities, and expectations are distributed within coalitional arrangements (Park et al. 2021). From this perspective, durable territorial governance cannot rely solely on bilateral negotiations or hierarchical authority, but requires sustained, rule-based coordination across public institutions, private actors, civil society, and local communities. 161
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