A Simple Model of Government Decision-Making and Plurilateral Cooperation on Critical Materials

We develop an integrated framework to characterize multi-objective policymaking and apply it to the case of critical materials. The model considers that national policy decisions will be influenced by domestic agencies with different priorities and goals and be informed by actions taken by other countries pertaining to critical materials. This creates a potential basis for a group of countries to form a critical materials club to reduce the probability of supply shocks and/or their consequences. We show that in an environment with multiple policy-active governments, criticality assessments embedded in a multi-objective government with domain-specific bureaucracies and multiple instruments can rationalize divergent policy choices under similar risk environments, provide conditions under which international coordination is more or less likely and apply the model to consider the design and political economy of plurilateral arrangements for critical materials.