The global challenge of a“sustainable development,” irregardless of its many definitions, must be accommodating of one of the most fundamental economic activities, natural resource extraction, particularly in developing states and regions.  Adopting a cautious premise of finite geologic capacity, this paper calls for a more comprehensive policy network centered on mineral extraction as an ultimate feature of global environmental policy.  Such a network can be mapped by incorporating three broad frameworks: development economics and business initiatives; global scientific perspectives on ecology, geology, and climate; and legal systems, ranging from “hard” national to “soft” international regimes.  These three frameworks include existing overlapping institutional capacities, but few redundancies, begging the question for an appropriate and timely paradigm this network might overlay.  A prime candidate is the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (“UNFCCC”), which is comprehensive of these policy areas by its own evolving expansion into matters including, among many others, “Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions” (“NAMAs”) accounting for relative development status, global geological and ecological monitoring, and human rights safeguarding.  The UNFCCC offers the requisite breadth in its consideration of both ecological and human concerns in sustainable development.

This paper first draws from development economics, including Lant Pritchett’s long-run modeling of elite commitment and inclusive growth (“the guts of a Grand Unified Theory”), Herman Daly’s “ecological economics,” Richard Auty’s “Resource Curse” and this author’s research on alternative correlations of development and extraction.  In addition, a crucially important business approach is the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, as the global leader in monitoring accountability and responsible management of extraction.  Next, this paper incorporates the global scientific perspectives of carrying capacity, including Saleem Ali’s vision of sustainability and a prudent view of “Hubbert’s Peak” capacity of natural resource extraction versus formation rate.  Finally, the paper addresses various law-based regimes, including human rights, labor, rule-of-law analyses, and democratic capacity, citing to the World Resources Institute forthcoming Environmental Democracy Index.  This paper also seeks to explore a potential paradox in energy policy’s dependence on non-fuel resources, as a function of technological innovation and climate change mitigation.  Ultimately, the goal of this paper is to align a comprehensive policy network with an existing paradigm, the UNFCCC, and assess the resulting integration’s ability to address both extractive and climate change challenges.