Anti-Colonial Solutions to climate change – Developing Economics

When we discuss the climate crisis in economics, we are often confronted with a debate resting on technical solutions, emissions paths, and energy use: a certain amount of time to go from coal to turbines means a certain amount of carbon dioxide emitted, which means a certain likely degree of global temperature change. In environmental economics, climate change and its associated environmental problems are often framed as ‘externalities’; that is, unfortunate and unintended spillovers caused by market mechanisms. Often, social issues are taken into account within this narrative through sunny phrases like “sustainable development” or “just transition.” The responsible parties are often individuals, states, or firms that are often thought to take action within the market. What does this debate look like if we take two different questions as starting points: not how to solve the climate crisis through market mechanisms and regulation, but how to solve the climate crisis while attending to the colonial legacy and exiting from contemporary neo-colonial accumulation patterns? Let us take a look.

The Common Discourse

A common narrative is that an industrialized humanity, churning out machinery and churning through hydrocarbons, is the primarily culprit for climate change. Firms as economic actors are often understood to have contributed to the crisis as well, since they respond to market signals, indexed in prices, and as a result, burn and pollute willy-nilly: what we call externalities. In this sense, the dominant discourse says that humanity on the whole has to shift from a carbon-fueled industrial civilization to a post-carbon civilization, relatively soon. The philosopher’s stone of decoupling is the means to do so: technological advance enabling a swapping out of extractive and CO2 emitting technology for non-CO2 emitting technology, allowing for growth without emissions. Economically, this also involves opening up new frontiers of accumulation, including turning nature into a final asset through assigning prices to ecosystems services, and creating new arenas of investment based on northern capital and southern states working in alliance to achieve a clean energy transition in the periphery of the world-system. Socially, this also assumes that capitalism is indifferent to racial disparities and Indigenous people; as it is assumed that through consultation with the latter or some kind of anti-racist legislation, alongside some tamping down of excess monopoly, we can achieve the utopia of not only clean, but also inclusive growth.

An Uncommon Discourse: Differentiated Responsibilities

A different notion of responsibility departs from a historical conception of the process of industrialization. It reminds us that we cannot understand industrialization outside the history of colonialism, and its relationship to a system of accumulation of surplus value – capitalism. Following the insights of Samir Amin, Celso Furtado, Raul Prebisch, Eric Williams, Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik, and Walter Rodney, amongst others, this perspective characterizes the seemingly apolitical process of industrialization as linked the violence of primitive accumulation, commodification, exchange, and war. That is, the slave trade, the colonization of the United States, the erection of colonial plantations in Africa, the Caribbean, Asia, and Latin America, all contributing the raw materials, food items, and export markets which subtended the low-waged process of European and eventually US industrialization. These processes, whose echoes are still reverberating, produced a massive amount of CO2 emissions. Furthermore, contemporary patterns of exchange, although not occurring under direct colonial patterns of control, are still unequal on South-North lines. That is, trade between formally independent states, based on the seemingly efficient price system, hides a new mode of control. An hour of labor in the North continues to receive a far higher reward than an hour of labor in the South, even when using similar or identical technologies, and northern products exchange for ever-increasing amounts of southern resources over time. As a result, wealth concentrates in the North, in part because wages and profit concentrate there, and produce and reproduce social-economic polarization within the world system.

Starting in the 1970s, scholars in the South like Amin, Ismail-Sabri Abdallah, and Gamani Corea began to argue that Southern and Northern responsibilities when it came to the ecological crisis were different. The South’s environmental problems were basically problems resolvable through becoming more developed, but developed in a way attentive to ecological harms. The North’s contribution to resolving the ecological crisis and dealing with their overall overuse of world resources and excessive waste production would be to help the South to industrialize in a just way, to stop using discourses of overpopulation, to share intellectual property and other resources, and to shift their style of development away from patterns which were using world resources on a scale which could not be replicated world-wide. This idea prefigured the notion of common yet differentiated responsibilities, as articulated at Rio in 1992: that the South and the North each certainly had responsibilities to deal with necessarily global ecological crises. But those responsibilities were differentiated because of their different histories: the legacy and lingering colonial and neo-colonial inheritance.

Ecologically Unequal Exchange

In the 2000s, notions of common yet differentiated responsibilities were increasingly codified intellectual through the idea of ecologically unequal exchange: that the global system of capitalist accumulation was not merely producing polarized wealth, but was polarizing the distribution of its wastes, and its use of natural resources. The North was using far more natural resources by any measure per person than the South, and the system of international trade, passing through the code of the price system, was dumping massive burdens of waste on the South, from garbage to pollution from factories to waste from the extraction of minerals. Such pollution meant that people in the South suffered from diminished lives, wracked with coughs and cancer, as a direct result of being woven into capitalist accumulation.

Another face of this unequal exchange has been the North’s appropriation of world safe space for carbon dioxide emissions: that is, the North has emitted far more than its per-person fair share of the amount of carbon dioxide that could be emitted to keep the Earth below 350 parts per million of Carbon Dioxide. In fact, overall the North is overwhelmingly responsible for that overuse, with a tiny bit by now at least numerically attributable to China and somewhat more to Russia/the former Soviet Union. Although, given that their emissions have been linked to guard themselves against foreign attack, it can be argued that such emissions are substantially also the responsibility of European-US-Japanese bloc.

Anti-Colonial Solutions: National Liberation and Climate Debt

If we accept the above analysis, a radical solution follows, and a radical resolution has been proposed: decolonize the atmosphere. This is what the Cochabamba People’s Agreement proposed, through the payment of climate debt – a sub-portion of the ecological debt, which was in turn a sub-portion of the colonial debt – to the tune of 6 percent of northern GNP per year. That would be around $1.2 trillion from the US and $3.2 trillion from the OECD. This document also attacked capitalism and militarism and imperialism, and proposed a people-centered development focused on appropriate technology and food sovereignty.

A second element of such a radical solution is to understand that national liberation is the framework to achieve global ecological justice. National liberation, in the words of the agronomist and revolutionary Amilcar Cabral, meant to “free the process of development of the national productive forces.” That means countries have to be free of foreign military attack, free of foreign control over their economies through unequal exchange and patent control, free of debt burdens, free of monopoly foreign control over their land, and free to plan and trade freely. Under those circumstances, they will be in a position to advocate for climate debt repayments as a means to install appropriate energy infrastructure, transportation systems, and the tools needed for endogenous industrialization (most countries don’t need any help with their national agricultures other than to place them under popular and poor peoples and peasants’ control).

Accompanying these processes means integrating carbon accounting into economic planning North and South. This, in turn, demands for the North to cease grabbing and enclosing more atmospheric space, and to shift to a less-resource intensive and more socialized development model that orients not to a national ecological development blind to northern relationships with the South, the former colonized world, but rather to a type of plan that allows for a global commonwealth and world developmental resurgence.

Max Ajl is a fellow at the Merian Center for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb, a Senior Fellow at the University of Ghent, and a researcher with the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment. He is an associate editor at Agrarian South and on the editorial board of Middle East Critique. His most recent book is A People’s Green New Deal. He tweets at @maxajl.

This blog post is a part of the Decolonising Economics blog series.

Photo: Edward Kimmel from Takoma Park, MD