Education Diplomacy in Critical Minerals: Indonesia’s Nickel Partnerships with the United States, Japan and Australia

Abstract

Critical minerals diplomacy is usually analysed as a contest over supply chains, investment and trade rules, while education is treated as a separate field of soft power. This article asks how education is positioned within Indonesia’s nickel partnerships with the United States, Japan and Australia, and what that positioning reveals about the terms on which a resource-rich middle power engages its partners. Using a qualitative comparative case design, the study applies document analysis and reflexive thematic analysis to 20 freely accessible official documents and reports, most issued between July 2023 and August 2026, including leaders’ joint statements, trade agreements, memoranda and ministerial statements. Four themes were identified. First, partners frame education primarily as workforce formation for mineral and clean-energy supply chains, while Indonesia’s own statements foreground downstream industrialisation and battery production. Second, education diplomacy runs largely on a parallel track: scholarships, university campuses and exchanges are prominent but rarely linked to mining, processing or battery skills. Third, framing is asymmetric: partners present education as attraction and long-term friendship, whereas Indonesia treats partnerships as channels for capital, technology and domestic vocational capacity built with industrial-park investors. Fourth, the United States shifted between 2023 and 2026 from a capacity-building partnership to a transactional market-access agreement, while Japan moved towards coupling minerals with industrial human resource development. The article proposes the Critical Minerals Knowledge Diplomacy (CMKD) framework, which locates partnerships by the coupling of education to the minerals agenda and by their developmental or transactional orientation, and introduces the concept of the downstream knowledge gap. It argues that education will strengthen Indonesia’s bargaining position only if it is negotiated as part of the minerals agenda rather than alongside it.