The importance of natural resources is recognized by its constitutional protection. A strategy to lower the impact of availability and cost of materials will have positive externalities, lessening exporting jobs abroad. A robust policy framework will improve eco‐efficient resource use and promote sustainable production and consumption. An Institutional Framework for Resource Management incorporating an international panel, would help to decouple natural resources use from its environmental impacts, monitor global material and energy flows balance and guide the design of policies and measures. Additionally, it would coordinate constituencies and generate information and knowledge, within the framework of existing environmental institutionalism. Humans change ecosystems to meet their respective needs. Their unfathomable ingenuity and drive needs a strong legal framework to provide order and deter predatory free market practices, thus limiting environmental degradation and depletion of natural resources throughout the global economy. The world economy is based on abundant fossil fuels reserves, and their use as fuels to supply energy and transport have the undesirable side‐effects of air pollution and global warming. Energy consumption is likely to expand with economic growth and prosperity; ‘business as usual’ needs to be checked with innovation playing a crucial role in reducing CO2 emissions and creating alternatives to satisfy societal needs, but also in devising new laws. Market enthusiasm alone without strong guidance could lead to disorder, like the optimistic biofuels boom, compared with a more organized and orderly evolution provided by laws such as the German feed‐in law or Danish container law. Better organization based on a robust legal framework, innovation, information and incentives, within a market context, will create conditions to develop core competences and attitudes for achieving efficiency. Incentives, economic and fiscal, will help counterbalance the increasing importance of gas and coal and promote life cycle thinking, ecoefficiency and ecoplanning of cities. While the paper gives an overview of these aspects, the main thesis of this paper is as follows: Raw materials supply could be secured by forging strategic alliances with reserve rich stable countries like Peru with 12 metals exhibiting 10 decades of constant growth. Methodologically, this paper follows the New Institutional Economics. The paper outlines a few suggestions for an international institutional arrangement. It is neither an ex‐post analysis of international regimes nor does it contain a modelling of players involved.