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Paper short abstract

This paper examines valuation controversies over mining revenues through discounted cash flow models. Drawing on empirical materials including fieldwork in Madagascar, it shows how investors, administrations and civil society confront financial models to negotiate future revenue sharing.

Paper long abstract

The energy transitions are intensifying the demand for critical minerals. This renews typical concerns in economic geography regarding how value derived from mining activity is shared and contributes to local development. The aim of this paper is to investigate valuation and distribution controversies by examining the practical uses and confrontations surrounding key calculating devices used in mining contexts: discounted cash flow models.

These models are widely used across the finance and mining industries to design business models and govern future investment decisions. They are also used by banks, international organisations, arbitration courts and increasingly by civil society organisations and resource-rich country administrations seeking to control, challenge and negotiate revenue sharing with mining firms operating in their countries.

The paper draws on empirical materials collected in Madagascar in 2022 as well as exploratory interviews conducted with European and African actors since 2024. It mobilises pragmatic approaches to valuation and STS finance literature to analyse how models are used to govern, value and construct complex objects, such as resources and mining projects, embedded in complex spatial relations including global production networks and wealth chains.

The paper shows that valuation controversies over resources, and the promised revenues associated with them, are entangled in competing uses of models between investors’ rationalities and knowledge, the capacities of administrations and civil society to advance alternative value narratives, and broader pricing mechanisms. It also shows that behind the technical appearance of models promoted by international organisations and experts, their uses are instrumentalised and embedded in power relations.