What a minerals partnership can actually do

Minerals diplomacy is written in verbs — coordinate, facilitate, discuss, advise — and reading which verb an arrangement uses tells you most of what it will deliver.

Pending review

A travelling gantry crane spanning a rail siding and a line of empty flatbed trailers on a paved apron, sheds and a second siding beyond. — Illustrative artwork: a rail and road interchange of the kind built through joint infrastructure agreements. Not a facility, equipment or material connected to this project. · Illustration · Osmond Hub

The short version

Minerals diplomacy produces platforms, forums, networks and memoranda, and the useful way to tell them apart is grammatical. The EU describes the Minerals Security Partnership Forum as a multilateral cooperation platform with a project group and a policy dialogue group. The Critical Raw Materials Act gives a project promoter the right to ask a standing subgroup to discuss and provide advice on how financing might be completed. Neither of those is a funding instrument, and neither pretends to be. What such arrangements supply is convening power, coordination and introductions — which is not nothing, and is not capital.

The verbs

Take the clearest current example and read its own description carefully. The "Minerals Security Partnership (MSP) Forum is a multilateral cooperation platform bringing together 15 MSP Partners and another 15 critical mineral-producing and -consuming countries…"(opens in a new tab), and it was launched on 5 April 2024 in Leuven, Belgium(opens in a new tab). Its membership is listed in full: thirty members, producers and consumers alike.

Its structure is set out as two separately described components: "a project group that focuses on supporting and accelerating individual critical mineral projects, and; a policy dialogue group addressing key policy issues linked to the secure and sustainable supply of critical minerals"(opens in a new tab). Longer descriptions of each are attributed to the same page — the project group working through engagement opportunities including project information sharing, presentations, technical assistance and geological survey requests, the policy dialogue group encouraging discussions with an initial focus on public-private investments and ESG standards — but neither is in the text retrieved for this article, so both are given here unquoted and unlinked.

Supporting, accelerating, addressing. Those are real activities — but a page describing what an arrangement does, which makes no mention of funding at all, is telling a reader something precise about it.

Read the verb. "Facilitate" and "finance" are different undertakings, and only one of them has a balance sheet.

What a promoter can actually ask for

Where an arrangement has been written into law, the entitlement it creates can be read exactly, and the EU's is unusually explicit.

The Critical Raw Materials Act provides that a standing subgroup shall, "at the request of a project promoter of a Strategic Project, discuss and provide advice on how the financing of its project can be completed"(opens in a new tab). The Commission's own guidance restates it in the same register: a project may request a meeting of the financing subgroup to "discuss and provide advice on how the financing of the project can be completed, taking into account private and public sources of funding"(opens in a new tab).

That is a right to a meeting and to advice. It is not a right to money, and the article does not pretend otherwise. What accompanies it is a duty on the Commission to carry "out activities, where appropriate in cooperation with Member States, to accelerate and crowd-in private investments in Strategic Projects"(opens in a new tab) — crowd-in, again, rather than provide.

There is also an accountability provision that is worth watching. By 24 May 2026 the Commission was to submit "a report to the Board describing obstacles to accessing finance"(opens in a new tab), based on the subgroup's advice. A convening mechanism that is required to report on what it could not solve is a more honest instrument than one that is not.

Offtake, not capital

The second thing these arrangements offer is a customer, or at least an introduction to one, and for a developer that can be worth more than a grant.

Announcing its first list of Strategic Projects outside the EU, the Commission said the selected projects will "benefit from coordinated support by the Commission, Member States and financial institutions in the form of facilitating access to finance and contacts with relevant off-takers"(opens in a new tab). The FAQ describes the intended mechanism as a "system that the Commission will set up to facilitate the conclusion of offtake agreements related to Strategic Projects, in accordance with competition rules"(opens in a new tab) — with that final clause doing quiet work, since coordinating buyers is exactly the activity competition law is most alert to.

The qualification for a new producer is the classic barrier in this sector: a first-time supplier of a specification-sensitive material has no track record, and buyers qualify suppliers slowly. An introduction that carries a government's implicit assurance is a genuine intervention in that problem, and it costs the treasury nothing.

Where the money actually sits

The financing is real, but it sits in institutions rather than in the partnership. The Minerals Security Partnership was established in June 2022 as a US-led initiative, and the MSP Finance Network was launched on 23 September 2024, bringing together the development finance institutions and export credit agencies of partner countries.

A network of lenders is not a fund: each institution keeps its own mandate, country limits, risk appetite and board. What the network changes is the probability that several of them look at the same project, and that a deal too large or too remote for one of them gets syndicated rather than declined.

On what it has produced, the most recent count located for this article is dated and is reported as such: as at October 2024, a legal analysis recorded that 10 "projects have been launched under the MSP, with 30 more currently being evaluated"(opens in a new tab). No current figure was established, and none is asserted here.

The EU's own equivalent tally is a list rather than a count of outcomes: the "first list of 13 Strategic Projects on strategic raw materials located outside of the EU, including in overseas countries or territories"(opens in a new tab), adopted in June 2025 and grouped by the release itself rather than listed flat: seven located in Canada, Greenland, Kazakhstan, Norway, Serbia, Ukraine and Zambia, "with whom the EU has a strategic partnership on raw materials value chains"(opens in a new tab), and the remaining six in Brazil, Madagascar, Malawi, New Caledonia, South Africa and the United Kingdom.

How to read the next one

Four questions get most of the way, and all are answerable from the document itself. Who signed it — heads of government, ministries, or agencies with budgets? Which verb governs the operative sentence — will provide, will facilitate, will endeavour, intend to? Is there an instrument behind it, so that the arrangement produces a decision a promoter can point to, or does it produce a meeting? And is there a reporting obligation, which is the only thing that reliably distinguishes an arrangement anyone will be held to from one that can quietly lapse.

None of that makes convening arrangements empty. Coordination between thirty states on standards, permitting practice and financing appetite is slow and worth doing. It is simply a different category of thing from a plant being built — and the documents say so, if read at the level of the verb.

Related

Investment Incentives — the instruments that do carry money, and
Trade Agreements — the binding instruments that sometimes follow a
Government Policy — where partnerships sit among the other instruments
Countries and Processing Centres — the jurisdictions and facilities these arrangements concern