Francisco J. Monaldi

Francisco J. Monaldi is the Wallace S. Wilson Fellow in Latin American Energy Policy and director of the Latin America Energy Program at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy. His relevance to resource investors is specific: for more than two decades he has studied resource nationalism — governments asserting greater state control over minerals and hydrocarbons — the above-ground risk (political and policy failure rather than geology) that can change a mining project's economics after capital is already committed.

His grounding is oil. He holds a Ph.D. in political economy from Stanford and a master's in international economics from Yale, has taught at the Harvard Kennedy School, Stanford, and Tufts University's Fletcher School, and built his reputation documenting how Venezuela's state oil company, PDVSA, collapsed under political pressure — work published in the peer-reviewed journal Resources Policy and with the Atlantic Council. The same lens drives his mining research: the Baker Institute working paper 'Political Risk and Resource Nationalism in Latin American Mining and Minerals' (2024), co-authored with Baker Institute colleagues, examines how the energy-transition minerals rush is raising political and country risk across Latin American mining jurisdictions.

His approach treats political risk as cyclical rather than ideological. When prices are high, governments demand a bigger share of mineral rents (the excess profit a resource generates); once investment is sunk, their bargaining power grows, and the tools include contract renegotiation, in-country processing mandates, concentrate export restrictions, and nationalization. Monaldi argues the durable variable is institutional quality — whether courts, regulators, and contracts hold up between election cycles — and he applies it jurisdiction by jurisdiction, from Chile and Peru to Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, and Mexico, and to cases such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo's ban on copper and cobalt concentrate exports.

Investors can follow his work through the Baker Institute's Latin America Energy Program and interviews such as 'Resource Nationalism Rising with Copper Prices' on the Mining Network channel (August 2026). There he frames today's strong copper prices as reviving downstream-processing mandates and describes resource nationalism's double edge: by constraining supply it can support prices, even as it creates company- and country-specific losses. His current focus also covers Venezuela's oil negotiations and the limits of U.S. critical minerals policy (strategic metals such as copper, lithium, and cobalt) against China's dominance of mineral refining.