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Abstract

French

Legacies of colonial rule, continuing neocolonial extraction, and excessive carbon dumping have meant that the majority of those living in the Global South experience many of the consequences of climate change more acutely than those in the Global North. As such, several countries in the Global North have committed to providing climate aid to decarbonise and reverse the alarming climate trajectory in the Global South. Yet, climate aid by and large discounts the internal competencies and resources within the Global South and aligns climate policies with neoliberal market agendas. In arguing against what has been called climate aid colonialism, we advocate for South-South solidarity and climate reparations, wherein climate justice articulated and advanced at the grassroots level from within the Global South is attuned to the socio-political requirements of decolonisation. Together, climate reparations and South-South solidarity can address the structures of coloniality that drive both climate change and climate aid.

Keywords

Global South Global North climate change coloniality solidarity reparations

Introduction

Climate change is, by definition, a planetary emergency. Experts on climate change are concerned about the declining capacity of the planet's climate to contain rising amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Although the consequences of climate change are grave for both the Global North and Global South, these consequences are not experienced proportionally. Despite the Global North being responsible for far more carbon emissions than the Global South, countries in the Global South have experienced climate change much more acutely (Hickel, 2020). Sultana (2022: 4) describes this as climate coloniality, “where Eurocentric hegemony, neocolonialism, racial capitalism, uneven consumption, and military domination are co-constitutive of climate impacts experienced by variously racialised populations who are disproportionately made vulnerable and disposable.”

In attempting to take responsibility for climate change (rather than climate coloniality), national and corporate leaders in the Global North have led on foreign aid efforts that claim to address the alarming climate trajectory in the Global South. In this debate piece, we seek to demonstrate that when the principal carbon emitters attempt to take control of the climate justice movement¹ through the liberal language of foreign aid, the climate movement becomes politically defanged and neocolonial relations of dependence are lent legitimacy (Holmes, 2012; Morvaridi, 2012). Approaching climate justice in the Global South – and in Africa in particular (Abbas and Niyiragira, 2009; Smilak and Putnam, 2022) – through foreign aid provisions discounts the voices of those in the Global South while seeking to align climate policies with the political and neoliberal economic market agendas of elites in the Global North. In this approach, donor interests are ultimately placed above any professed commitment to climate justice (Weiler and Sanubi, 2019; Weiler Klöck and Dornan, 2018).

Scholars such as Wu et al. (2021) and Donner et al. (2016) note that climate aid refers to aid provision that seeks to reduce negative environmental “externalities” and improve adverse environmental conditions. In this article we argue that climate aid donors are not only limited in their stated decarbonisation goals. They, in fact, disallow climate justice proper by turning away from the structural processes of capital accumulation (e.g. mineral extraction, land dispossession, carbon dumping, waste making, and industrial emissions) that are responsible for most carbon emissions (see Griffin, 2017). Climate aid donors, therefore, tend to prioritise a slightly reformed structure of monopoly capitalism that continues the colonial mandate of developing the Global North at the expense of the Global South. In this regard, climate aid serves as a functionary of neocolonial governance.

We situate our arguments in the underdevelopment literature (see, e.g. Rodney, 1972), which speaks to how economic development in the Global North depends on the structural underdevelopment of the Global South. Such underdevelopment tends to rely on neocolonial apparatuses of resource extraction and dependency. Specifically, we argue against climate aid's neocolonial agenda (what we call – following Murithi (2009) – climate aid colonialism). Instead, we advocate for South-South solidarity² and climate reparations,³ wherein climate justice is articulated and advanced at the grassroots level from within the Global South and is attuned to the socio-political requirements of decolonisation. Together, climate reparations and South-South solidarity are, we argue, able to address the very structures of coloniality that drive not only climate change but also climate aid. In this, we emphasise African agency against neocolonial underdevelopment structures (see, e.g. Zondi, 2013).

It is worth providing a brief conceptual note on our use of the terms “Global North” and “Global South.” Although they appear to be geographic categories, they denote political concepts that place their heuristic accent on shifting geopolitical power differentials (Kloß, 2017). As Dados and Connell (2012: 13) put it:

The term Global South functions as more than a metaphor for underdevelopment. It references an entire history of colonialism, neo-imperialism, and differential economic and social change through which large inequalities in living standards, life expectancy, and access to resources are maintained.

We do not, however, wish to elide the conceptual trouble posed by these two terms. Contradictions mark the imperial centres in the Global North as well as the Global South. Global capitalism produces bourgeois classes in both the Global North and in the Global South. There are some countries in the Global North that have been colonised by other countries in the Global North. Similarly, there are a small number of Global South countries that have taken up the neoimperial project initiated by the Global North. For instance, China's substantial investments in infrastructure, mining, and energy sectors in Africa have been viewed by some as an avenue to establish economic dependencies and increase China's geopolitical leverage (see Li, 2021).

With respect to climate change, there are also Global South countries that, as we will later see, are involved in industrial-scale pollution. As such, the terms Global South and Global North have been debated and taken up in a number of different ways, not all of which have been politically or analytically useful (Kloß, 2017). While we should not turn away from their conceptual challenges, we insist that the terms Global North and Global South remain useful for understanding the contemporary global order precisely because their open-ended nature accommodates for how shifting contemporary currents of coloniality are rooted in histories of colonialism emerging from the Global North (see Kloß, 2017; Uzoigwe, 2019). With respect to our purposes in this article, we argue that the African continent – which has contributed among the least to global greenhouse gasses yet faces some of the worst consequences of climate change – is usefully situated within the Global South. It is through using the imprecise – but nonetheless generative – categories of Global North and Global South that we attempt to speak to the colonial constitution of contemporary capitalism and thus, also, the climate crisis.

Aid Colonialism

In developing an understanding of what we are calling climate aid colonialism, it is necessary to outline what is meant by aid colonialism. Foreign aid can take many forms, but we specifically focus on the aid that Global North governments provide to recipient states in the Global South. The Global North countries belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation's Development Assistance Committee label this kind of foreign aid as Official Development Assistance, which is defined as “government aid that promotes and specifically targets the economic development and welfare” of recipient states, in contrast to assistance for military or commercial enterprises (ODA n.d., n.p). This aid can take the form of grants or concessional loans, material goods, or technical support and flow from state to state or through multilateral institutions, like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, or African Development Bank.

Aid, it should be emphasised, is not charity. On the surface, it is put forward as a partnership of assistance between two equal parties. However, this partnership is far from equal. As Amin (2009) notes, the very term “partnership” is used to conceal precisely what most foreign aid agreements are not. Thinkers like Goudge (2003) and Táíwò (2022b) have argued that during the so-called classic era of colonialism, beginning in the fifteenth century, colonial governments expropriated so much value from the colonies that, today, the national budgets and Gross Domestic Products (GDPs) of these “former” colonies – especially in sub-Saharan Africa – are hugely reliant on aid and are thus subject to the conditionalities attached to aid packages, conditionalities that are determined by elite⁴ economic and imperial interests. Although the degree to which some African governments have implemented and accepted these conditionalities has been debated (Van de Walle, 2001), aid packages function by and large as a technology of colonial control (Murithi, 2009). The terms and principles upon which foreign aid is delivered and conceived, as well as the form and volume of aid, are not defined by recipient states in any democratic manner (Táíwò, 2022a).

Foreign aid in the form of loans acts as a credit system that creates debt within the recipient country that is paid for through the sale of primary commodities (e.g. coffee, cobalt, gold, or uranium) to the Global North. These commodities are subject to global market forces that often devalue raw materials, with considerable national wealth syphoned off, with countries in the Global South having to make debt payments by relying on a global trading system in which they do not benefit from the full value of the resources they contribute (Tandon, 2011). Other non-loan-based forms of foreign aid – such as food aid, debt relief, and technical assistance – may exacerbate dependency in the receiving country and deepen its incorporation into the world capitalist system.

Okoth (2023) recounts how foreign aid, especially in Africa, began to take root at the same time that the neoliberal project took on its neocolonial, global formation in the 1970s and 1980s. He notes that during the 1973-1974 oil crisis, non-oil-producing countries in the Global South were facing budgetary constraints and considerable debt (caused in large part by an over-reliance on exporting primary commodities whose prices they could not control) and thus moved to accepting foreign aid to cover state spending. Such neocolonial infrastructure paved the way for the now-infamous Structural Adjustment Programmes that sought to restructure the economies of poorer nations in accordance with the policies of US-dominated institutions like the World Bank and the IMF (see Amin, 2009; Táíwò, 2022b). Structural adjustment policies effectively meant increased austerity, tightened monetary supplies, raised interest rates, and reduced wages, all of which made a domestic development agenda almost impossible to implement, with debt burden quickly ensuring that debt servicing and repayment was prioritised over social spending (see Okoth, 2023). Today, on average, low-income countries spend almost twice as much on servicing aid debt than on social assistance. For example, many low-incomecountries, on average, spend around 1.4 times more on aid debt than on healthcare (Mazzucato, 2023).⁵

The apparent economic imperative of foreign aid has political implications that often go unstated. Aid donors can impose their visions of development, including notions of democracy, governance, and economic reform. Many organisations, such as the World Bank and the IMF, offer aid packages that are conditional on recipient countries adopting governance decisions that align with the policy prescriptions of these institutions. This includes multilateral conditionalities such as the provision of markets for donor countries to export goods; economic restructuring; and neoliberal, austerity-prone models of governance (see, e.g. Akyuz, 2017; Murithi, 2009). Basic life in the recipient country (e.g. decisions that determine job availability, the price of food, and public services) are thus determined by foreign bureaucrats (who face little accountability) (Mawdsley, 2018), with important decisions about national possibilities and “development” decided by large global institutions that need not be democratically accountable (Bond and Sharife, 2009).

The global “integration” agenda that has accompanied structural adjustment and bilateral aid programmes from the Global North has generally rendered recipient countries even more vulnerable to external financial shocks by making their economies and state coffers more dependent on global markets (Akyuz, 2017). For example, the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness of 2005 was endorsed by (or rather, “imposed on,” as argued by Amin [2009: 60]) more than donor 100 countries and international agencies. It stated that donor countries were accountable only to their own taxpayers; would respect the rules of the World Trade Organization; and could tie aid to commercial opportunities for their own firms, investors and markets (Amin, 2009). Moreover, neoliberal economic conditions can be imposed onto Global South countries through such bilateral aid programmes. The IMF, for example, has moved several Global South countries away from trade taxes (Reinsberg et al., 2020).

Beyond hemming aid-dependent economies even more to the Global North, foreign aid benefits Global North countries in other ways. For example, the Paris Agreement allows donors to rely on technical assistance from foreign consultants despite the availability of less costly expertise in recipient countries and imposes cumbersome monitoring and administrative requirements that raise the costs of accepting foreign aid for Global South countries. At the same time, donors are able to double count debt relief (both at the moment of giving the original concessional loan and at the moment of forgiving it) and to count partial disbursements when calculating how much donor countries offer in foreign aid, making them appear more “generous” than they are (see Mutasa, 2009; Tchuigoua, 2009).

Recipients are aware of these problems, but at the G7 Summits, proposals put forward by democratic actors within recipient countries regarding how foreign aid might be used to develop their countries in their own interests are routinely ignored. This is because notions of development are confined to an economised model of development (e.g. GDP growth and expanding markets for exports and internal trade) that is inattentive to modes of socialised development that would address, for instance, inequitable income, gendered and racialised inequalities, distribution of resources, access to communal goods like health and education, direct democratisation, power differentials, and autonomy (Amin, 2009). In short, foreign aid – especially in African countries – has compounded debt crises and increased the economic dependency of much of the Global South on the Global North (Langan, 2018), all while impeding the sovereignty and democratic decision-making capacities of these countries (Akyuz, 2017; Goudge, 2003; Táíwò, 2022b). The result of this is that the resources from the "formerly" colonised countries receiving aid are by and large used to fund capitalist development in the Global North (Tandon, 2011).

It seems clear that most foreign aid serves as a means for coloniser states to retain control over "formerly" colonised countries, with these coloniser states effectively functioning as de facto governing bodies of these countries (Táíwò, 2022a). In responding to the role that foreign aid can play in consolidating neocolonial dependency, Murithi (2009) makes use of the term “aid colonialism.” Although not all foreign aid is colonial in nature (the aid that Sweden provided to some anti-colonial efforts in the mid-1950s, for example, represented a progressive kind of aid; Amin, 2009), we contend that most foreign aid imposes conditionalities that are not in the material interests of the recipient countries and should thus be understood as a form of neocolonialism.

In conceptualising foreign aid as aid colonialism, our attention is drawn to how aid can manipulate, control, and coerce recipient countries to adopt a donor's agenda; oftentimes doing so through the liberal language of fiscal discipline, respect for human rights, empowerment, good governance, poverty reduction, human well-being, trade liberalisation, and disbursement (see Langan, 2018; Murithi, 2009; Tchuigoua, 2009). Even the term “development,” under which foreign aid tends to operate, conflates different class interests (Ajl, 2023), thereby obscuring how the underdevelopment of countries in the Global South (and the increasing poverty and decreasing standards of living that this entails) serves as the condition for the overdevelopment of the Global North, as was the case during the so-called classical era of colonialism (see Rodney, 1972 for a masterful account of this exploitative relationship). Aid colonialism maintains global power relations and subordination under the guise of contributing to the prosperity of recipient countries, oftentimes echoing the very racist attitudes that were consolidated during the classical colonial era (e.g. it is only the benevolent, colonising countries that can save the colonised world from its inherent backwardness; Goudge, 2003). The policies, incentives, penalties, and funding conditions of foreign aid packages ensure that the needs of wealthier states are met at the expense of poorer, formally colonised nations, oftentimes deepening recession, poverty, and political unrest in these nations (Murithi, 2009; Perkins, 2019). How we understand aid policies, the choice of aid recipients, forms of aid intervention, and the objectives of foreign aid, therefore, cannot be separated from imperialist geopolitical powers (Amin, 2009).

Foreign aid, to be sure, has been responsible for some positive outcomes within recipient countries. There are several instances where foreign aid has served as a lifeline in moments of severe crisis in recipient countries, especially regarding food and other vital commodities (Abbas and Niyiragira, 2009; Shimada, 2022). It is because of such outcomes that liberal, pro-aid criticism tends to argue for more effective aid, without examining the political consequences or long-term effects of foreign aid (see Murithi, 2009). This effectiveness argument avoids engaging with the neocolonial structure of foreign aid. However, if we are to interrogate the politics of foreign aid, examine how aid determines “development,” question whether aid sets out what it aims to do, and analyse if aid has been used to pave the way for its own redundancy, it is vital that we engage with the neocolonial underpinnings of foreign aid provision. In short, we must grapple with aid colonialism (Abbas and Niyiragira, 2009; Amin, 2009).

The promises of foreign aid (e.g. plural democracy, good governance, poverty reduction), we argue, can only be achieved through internal struggles for political, social, and economic justice; struggles that are led by the demos within recipient countries, rather than imposed by the representatives of global capital (Ajl, 2023; Amin, 2009). Foreign aid rarely, if ever, supports these struggles, and in many cases actively undermines them. This, as we will see, is especially the case for those fighting for climate justice in the Global South, where the effects of the climate emergency have been most dire.

Climate Aid Colonialism

Wu et al. (2021) note that climate aid refers to a specific kind of foreign aid whereby development assistance is offered to mitigate and adapt to climate change. With the climate crisis becoming increasingly alarming, climate aid has, accordingly, been made a prescient feature of international diplomacy. Indeed, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change of 1992 – the parent treaty to the 2015 Paris climate agreement (Harvey, 2023) – indicated that there is a responsibility to provide climate aid to “particularly vulnerable” countries in the Global South (UNFCCC, 2009), and at the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference, a “loss and damage” fund was set up to provide climate aid to these same countries (UN, 2022). As such, since the 2000s, climate aid has become increasingly prominent within the foreign aid agenda (Kablan and Chouard, 2022).

Climate agreements have emphasised that climate finance should be provided in addition to non-climate-related aid, which some may argue represents an attempt to acknowledge the climate debt owed by the Global North to the Global South. Yet, most of today's climate finance takes the form of ODA and is, therefore, distributed through existing aid channels. It does not yet represent a major qualitative shift in the nature of aid to the Global South. Thus, we wish to argue that the very structure of climate aid, like global foreign aid more generally, functions to propel what we refer to as climate aid colonialism. One telling example of this link between aid and coloniality is the partnership between Glencore, a mining company operating in Guajira Peninsula, Colombia, and the US Agency for International Development (USAID), to develop community farms in areas affected by drought in Colombia's Guajira Peninsula. Until Colombia's first leftist president, Gustavo Petro, assumed office in August 2022, Glencore mined coal in El Cerrejón, considered as the largest open-pit coal deposit in Latin America, with little care for the environment or local population. Glencore's operations displaced indigenous communities and polluted the environment. After four decades of breathing the poisonous dust of the mine, one-third of the population in La Guajira region (nearly 340,000 people) suffer respiratory symptoms (OXFAM America, 2023). The US-Glencore “climate aid” programme, as argued by McKenzie and Cohen (2018), obfuscates the layered forms of historic exploitation in Colombia, including colonialism, slavery, extractive capitalism, and paramilitary violence, much of it fuelled by Plan Colombia, a US-financed programme that claimsto eradicate drug production while also bolstering US economic interests in the region. Introducing new development programmes while this exploitation continues unabated perpetuates the fundamentally neocolonial nature of the US’ aid, although now under a “climate-friendly” guise (McKenzie and Cohen, 2018).

Táíwò (2022b) further provides several examples of climate aid colonialism in Africa. For example, USAID has partnered with the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), which officially aims to provide climate-sensitive food crops and flowers to African farmers, but also advocates agrochemical crops that use multi-genome patents and requires significant fertiliser inputs. AGRA's objective is therefore to gain control over Africa's plant biomass in order to generate enormous profits for chemical and seed corporations as well as its billionaire funders (i.e. Gates and Rockefeller). The case of AGRA is exemplary of how climate aid is used for commercial, expansionary, and “profitable solutions,” rendering it too ineffective to address the climate emergency (Seymour, 2022). Weiler Klöck and Dornan (2018) found in their analysis of bilateral adaptation climate aid provided between 2010 and 2015 that most climate aid was leveraged as a foreign policy tool to promote the elite economic and political interests of donor countries in the Global North.⁶ For instance, the development of Kenya's Climate Change Action Plan was significantly influenced by donor funding from the UK's Department for International Development and involves a push for the adoption of energy technologies and approaches that benefit UK industry (see British High Commission Nairobi, 2022; Newell et al., 2014).

Climate aid relies on reproducing static images of recipient countries so that donors can engage with recipients in accordance with these static images. To do this, the epistemological machinery of the colonial era is relied upon (see Said, 1978, for a classic study here). As Sultana (2022) argues, climate aid discourse positions donor countries as saviours or the sole proprietors of climate solutions, determining what these solutions are and who is worthy of receiving them without acknowledging the Global North's complicity with climate change or the especially devastating consequences of climate coloniality in the Global South. Examples of the Global North's ongoing complicity in climate change include the reliance that many countries in the Global North have on importing cheap resource-intensive products from the Global South, or how waste and atmospheric pollution is exported from the Global North to many countries in the Global South (Dorninger et al., 2021).

Nsah (2023) recounts that non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and corporatised state institutions in the Global North oftentimes employ an image of Africa as “the last Eden on earth” whose natural resources and indigenous ecological knowledges require a mode of top-down protection (and thus control) that cannot be undertaken by a “backward” or “incompetent” South (see Vasko, 2022 for a historical account of this phenomenon). It is, in turn, a (neo)colonial outsider that is positioned as able to exercise such protection and control through climate aid. It is with these sorts of colonial images that the climate aid industry expropriates resources from the Global South – especially in Africa – while at the same time claiming to protect these resources (Tandon, 2011). Nsah (2023: 4) demonstrates that the Korup National Park established in Cameroon “was part of a colonial enterprise across the African continent inspired by the myth of an African pristine and virgin Eden that needs to be protected against Africans while providing European colonialists then and some western neocolonialists now unfettered access to control and exploit African natural resources.”

As with foreign aid more generally, climate aid has shown to have some positive effects. Shimada (2022), for instance, analysed panel data on Africa collected between the years 1961 and 2011 to examine the impact of climate-related disasters like droughts, floods, and storms on various economic and social variables, and found that climate aid did indeed mitigate some of the impacts of such climate-related disasters. Another study conducted by Zeng et al. (2022) found that climate aid increased carbon reduction resources and promoted renewable energy (see also Wu et al., 2021 for a similar study). Nonetheless, Shimada's (2022) study highlights that although climate aid has had some positive effects within recipient countries, these effects were ultimately insignificant compared to the negative consequences wrought by climate-related disasters, disasters for which industrial-scale emissions in the Global North have been largely responsible. Climate aid, in other words, offers “solutions” that are far outscaled by the size of the challenges posed by the climate emergency and that elide responsibility for this emergency; offering, at best, starting contributions to the much more urgent task of implementing climate justice on a global scale (Táíwò, 2022b).

In our view, many otherwise useful critiques of climate aid fall somewhat short in criticising the politics underlying such aid (namely, the politics of aid colonialism). Seymour's (2022) analysis, for example, calls for climate aid donors to review their aid interventions and to act quickly to support Africa's capacity to adapt to climate disasters. Uzoigwe (2022) similarly calls for improved effectiveness of climate aid through investing in renewable energy projects, data monitoring, and performance evaluation. Quicker action, reviewed policy, better investment, and improved evaluation are quite compatible with finance capital, and do not usher in the fundamental shift required to move away from aid colonialism. Climate justice interventions must engage directly with the global neocolonial economic system. For example, measures like carbon taxes have been shown to play a more significant role in decreasing carbon emissions than providing climate aid for renewable energy (Kablan and Chouard, 2022). However, we must go further than progressive taxes and economistic solutions. The colonial conditionalities, neocolonial control, epistemological violence, and the undemocratic decision-making that constitute climate aid underline the decolonial imperative that must propel legitimate commitments to climate justice (see Perkins, 2019).

Resisting Climate Aid Colonialism: Two Pathways

Although there are several useful accounts of how climate movements have taken up the decolonial imperative (e.g. Chao and Enari, 2021; Hope, 2022; Perkins, 2019; Wilkens and Datchoua-Tirvaudey, 2022), a sustained consideration of climate aid colonialism has been largely absent from these, nonetheless, very useful engagements (see Sultana, 2022 for an important exception). In what follows, we consider two ways by which to resist climate aid colonialism, assert the Global South's agency (and African agency in particular), and promote climate justice, namely, building South-South solidarity and demanding climate reparations.

South-South Solidarity

Resisting climate coloniality on a planetary scale is immensely challenging precisely because capitalist economic processes are global (Akyuz, 2017). This is not to say that capitalism is universally homogenous. Capitalism, as we have seen, assumes neocolonial formations in much of the Global South, with industrial development in the Global North dependent on the exploitation and expropriation of socio-ecological resources in the Global South (Ajl, 2023; Rodney, 1972). As such, when faced with costly environmental regulation, corporations are likely to move their production and extraction processes to places with less stringent regulation (Táíwò, 2022b). The Global North's dependence on the Global South, however, points to a vulnerability in the global capitalist system. Indeed, if the Global North depends on extracting from and dumping into the Global South's ecologies, the Global South is by no means dependent on the Global North (Amin, 2009). Seizing upon this structural vulnerability requires coalition building among the peoples most oppressed by climate coloniality.

Murithi (2009) suggests that aid colonisation in Africa, like other forms of neocolonialism, can be countered by managing and distributing resources through a continental integration network, such as the African Continental Free Trade Area, to which countries voluntarily subscribe. Throughout Latin America, there have been several integration efforts of this sort that have sought to break the Global North's capitalist monopolies on “sustainable development” (Hope, 2022). However, integration in and of itself is unlikely to bring about the progressive political and policy commitments that climate justice demands. The key component of such a network is, therefore, its democratic and politically committed character. This sort of integrated, democratically organised political commitment among Global South nations – and, in particular, the most marginalised populations within these nations – is known as South-South solidarity. Nel and Taylor (2013: 1091–1092) define South-South solidarity as

a mutual attitude of affective empathy flowing from a shared experience that involves common hardship of one sort or another, the collective pursuit of a common good, and the recognition and observance of reciprocal moral duties, including respect for national sovereignty, fundamental equality and mutual benefit.

Importantly, for the purpose of resisting climate coloniality, South-South solidarity must be held accountable to organised grassroots struggles, for whom South-South solidarity functions “as a means not only to break from colonial entrapment but also as a terrain of self-invention in opposition to the Northern domination” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Tafira, 2018: 127). In this way, movements across the Global South can also hold their own governments accountable to their demands for ecological and climate justice.

The most effective South-South solidarity is created in the liminal space that exists between states, sectors of civil society, and most importantly, grassroots social movements. During the anti-colonial and Bandung eras of the mid-twentieth-century, support was offered from the non-aligned movement; the Organisation for African Unity; the Organisation of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America; the Cuban government; and the Soviet Union to liberation struggles in places like South Africa and Zimbabwe (Amin, 2009; Okoth, 2023). Today, for many in the Global South, surviving climate coloniality necessitates engaging in everyday solidarity actions, like prefigurative mutual cooperation, which tends to operate independently from the state (Sultana, 2022). There is, of course, an inherent tension between the state, social movements, and civil society. Many of the state infrastructures and legislations in Africa, for instance, carry with them the dictatorial memory and weak legislative apparatuses of colonial regimes (Táíwò, 2022b). Climate activists are certainly aware that the state is routinely used as an apparatus of oppression and that justice proper can only come from the ground up. However, they are also aware that the state, once democratised, is crucial for halting the excesses of climate coloniality (see Bond, 2006). Advancing climate justice through South-South solidarity will certainly require state mechanisms and legislation, but it also necessitates involvement from ordinary citizens working together in the initiation, monitoring, evaluation, and institutionalisation stages of climate justice agendas (Mutasa, 2009).

In a global capitalist system of nation states, activists cannot ignore the state (Okoth, 2023). Although states are always part of climate coloniality, they require a modicum of consent from the demos, and are thus open to being moulded by pressure from below, meaning that they can be held accountable to the demands of social movements.⁷ States must, however, be pushed towards a genuine, decolonising vision of climate justice precisely because such a vision is not profitable (see Seymour, 2022). It is thus crucial that South-South solidarity be built between different social movements that remain independent from states while, at the same time, holding states accountable to climate justice initiatives. It is through this push and pull – working with and against the state – that activists in solidarity strive towards what Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor (2024) call the solidarity state which, in contrast to the liberal welfare state, relies on state mechanisms to democratise the control, ownership, and allocation of resources for the purpose of consolidating solidarity relations built at the grassroots level. The solidarity state can be made to impose limits on excessive extraction and exploitation, while implementing socially and ecologically sustainable growth strategies across the Global South (Brand et al., 2021).

We might, then, say that South-South solidarity means taking seriously a kind of climate justice that is built through democratic participation and emphasises open decision-making among activists and state actors. Indeed, the distribution of power cannot be mediated through mere representation. What is instead required is community control over the generation and distribution of resources (Táíwò, 2022b). Sovereignty can only be achieved through people's power of this sort (Stanford-Xosei, 2018). Direct democratic practice of this kind is appealing because it is exceedingly rare, displaced in most countries for an essentially undemocratic parliamentary form of representative democracy. South-South solidarity is, in this very sense, prefigurative: offering material visions of a more just society within the constraints of contemporary social arrangements, and in so doing challenges and denaturalises these constraints. Moreover, in advancing South-South solidarity through states and organised on-the-ground struggles, the variability of experiences of climate coloniality is taken seriously.

Some have raised the question of what major carbon emitters located in the Global South, such as, China, mean for advancing South-South climate justice solidarity. The agency of these governments should not be elided. It is, however, difficult to account for China's actual emissions in light of the number of companies from the Global North operating in China because of low production costs (i.e. high rates of worker exploitation), a situation which grassroots solidarity efforts cannot ignore (Baily and Bosworth, 2014). Official statistics show that 8,619 US companies are operating in China and 1,992 US-owned subsidiaries are based in China (Castillo, 2023). By contrast, 252 Chinese companies are listed on the US stock exchanges (US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, 2023). The role that capitalist industry in China plays in climate change, as well as the exploitative relations and legislation that characterise this industry, must therefore be understood as existing in a global context marked by coloniality. South-South solidarity engages critically with US economic hegemony as well as the exploitation of workers in and beyond the Global South.

The mechanisms of climate coloniality necessitate the destruction of local and/or indigenous knowledges, either for the purposes of dehumanising the peoples associated with these knowledges, to destroy forms of knowing that might aid decolonial resistance, or indeed to exploit these knowledges for the purposes of profit-making (as in the case of so-called bio-piracy; see Bond, 2006). It is for these very reasons that “epistemologies of the South directly confront coloniality” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Tafira, 2018: 128). Activists – such as those in the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance⁸ – building climate justice solidarity within and across the Global South are in a position to honour the sorts of epistemologies or ways of knowing that are routinely ignored or destroyed by the state and other neocolonial entities. The robust networks of knowledge and trust that have been accumulated through generations of decision-making and that have been passed down across social and political groups can assist in strengthening climate justice institutions (Táíwò, 2022b). Moreover, such epistemic infrastructure can open diverse ways of knowing climate justice and resisting climate coloniality (Wilkens and Datchoua-Tirvaudey, 2022). This is not, of course, to fetishise local knowing, but to bring politically relevant knowledges into the struggle for climate justice. In this, knowledge and struggle can be consolidated through one another in a dialectical fashion.

It is because ecological concerns are fundamental to social justice that South-South solidarity struggles cannot simply include ecology in its list of political demands (Seymour, 2022). The social advantages of climate justice must continually be made clear, as should the social disadvantages of climate devastation. Saving the environment also means saving those who live in it (Táíwò, 2022b). A South-South climate justice solidarity must effectively represent an “environmentalism for the poor” which connects ecological devastation to societal oppression (Ajl, 2023). An example of where such solidarity has been observed is in Ogoniland, located in Niger Delta region of Nigeria.

The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, had on 4 January 1993, mobilised more than 300,000 Ogoni people to non-violently protest the activities of Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria, the Nigerian subsidiary of Royal Dutch/Shell that had devastated their homeland (Sam et al., 2024). These protests soon accrued considerable solidarity, and became the largest peaceful demonstrations ever held against a multinational oil company, pioneering the now commonplace linking of environmental degradation and human rights (i.e. climate justice) through widespread international support, both on the ground and that of States (Sam et al., 2024). This grassroots action eventually led to cessation of oil-related activities by Shell in the area and pollution remediation since 1993.

We can see, then, that advancing climate justice from within South-South solidarity struggles cannot begin with abstractions (e.g. references to “net zero” or “decarbonisation”), but from where people are materially situated. The fight for land beyond sectional title, for example, must be connected to struggles for clean and accessible water, working infrastructure, sustainable waste management, clean air, and democratic decision-making (see Hickel, 2020). South-South solidarity is necessarily situated within an anti-capitalist agenda, whereby liberation from capitalism demands liberating ourselves from the neocolonial capitalist industry that is destroying the world – doing so most acutely in the Global South.

Dorninger et al. (2022) argues that solidarity names the practice of working together to achieve goals based on shared aims, primarily through agitation and conflict. Thus, to call for solidarity is not to bring every political entity into a singular position, but to bring about collective power through conflictual engagements that honour the sorts of deep democracy that are elided by neocolonial interventions like foreign aid. This is important for engaging the variability within the climate crisis as it unfolds throughout the Global South. The point of South-South solidarity is not to ignore development,⁹ but to decolonise development – reconfiguring what development might look like when enacted for and by populations of the South (Ajl, 2023). New development frames would certainly encompass a new economic order premised on care and repair. Far from advancing a universal programme of climate justice, South-South solidarity efforts are engaged with how climate justice can be advanced from the particular, and how the place in which we are situated informs how we assist others in resisting climate coloniality.

Climate Reparations

Amin (2009) insists that an abrupt departure from all foreign aid architecture would have dire consequences for the Global South, especially for those national budgets that depend heavily on aid. Yet, climate aid is not the only way by which to bring international funds into climate justice politics. What if we looked to reparations instead of aid? We can think of reparations as the efforts to repair and redress injustices wrought by, for example, colonialism and neocolonialism. Reparations can go beyond mere compensation, and instead seek to reappropriate stolen wealth while addressing the psychological and material consequences of this theft (Stanford-Xosei, 2018). Reparations thus constitute a project of building a just world through reconciliation that relies not on payments but on securing funds to improve community life, redistribute global wealth, remake international relations, (re)build institutions, establish autonomy, and foster an equitable restructuring of socio-economic arrangements (Kelley, 2002).

With climate change being so central to the structuring of today's global order, any “politically serious reparations project … must focus on climate justice” (Táíwò, 2022b: 157). Using a social cost of carbon framework, a recent report estimated that military interventions from the US and UK produced around 430 million metric tons of carbon emissions since the 2015 Paris accords. This amounts to around $111 billion in climate reparations in this social cost framework (Bigger et al., 2023). Climate reparations thus do not aim to recognise problems of climate change, nor do they respond to the immediate consequences of these problems, but instead work towards structurally distributing justice and restitution by facilitating and supporting different kinds of worldmaking that account for histories of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism across the Global South (Sultana, 2022). As such, climate reparations do not seek merely to right past wrongs, but to redress inequitable power relations throughout the Global South and demand justice for ongoing wrongs in a manner that is led and democratically organised by populations in the Global South.

Although rarely mentioned in official state-directed climate negotiations (Calliari et al., 2020), compensatory climate reparations have also not been embraced by many progressive actors committed to climate justice. Certainly, reparations can be co-opted, undemocratically constituted, elite-driven, and/or undertaken and conceptualised by those in the Global North as temporary and inefficient compensations for ongoing colonial plunder (Sultana, 2022). It is, therefore, important that climate reparations are conceptualised and enacted by social movements and civil society actors engaged in South-South solidarity. In this, transparency is crucial to every phase of the climate reparations process. All consultation forums must include grassroots movement actors who are involved in reparation design and who play a key role in how climate aid is distributed and managed, including education and capacity development programmes focused on the management of climate aid funds (Kelley, 2002; Murithi, 2009). Ensuring that the needs of the poor are always the starting point and end goal of climate reparations necessitates strengthening and coordinating militancy from sectors of civil society as well as those engaged in politically radical actions that disrupt society and refuse reparative reforms made in the image of climate coloniality (Bond and Sharife, 2009; Perkins, 2019).

Climate reparations themselves should not be framed in purely economic terms (à la climate aid) that obscure their fundamentally political character (see DuFord, 2022). We can instead think of climate reparations as a social debt that cannot be financialised and that implies obligation, solidarity, and reckoning with capitalism's structural inequalities, rather than charity or guilt (Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor, 2024). Climate reparations are, after all, about social justice, meaning that debt repudiation, the halting of the Global North's atmospheric colonisation, and even light, eco-friendly industrialisation oriented towards people's needs may form part of climate reparations (see Bond and Sharife, 2009; Sultana, 2022).

Climate reparations also necessitate an end to environmentally destructive industrial development and military intervention, much of which have been led by leaders in the Global North (see Bigger et al., 2023). There is also a legislative dimension to climate reparations, whereby grassroots pressure must ensure that the law is made amenable to planetary repair, seen for example in the actions undertaken by the Pan-Afrikan Reparations Coalition in Europe, the International Social Movement for African Reparations, as well as the Afrikan Reparations Transnational Community of Practice (see Stanford-Xosei, 2018). Even more broadly, climate reparations can and should encompass psychosocial support for the harm inflicted through climate coloniality (Stanford-Xosei, 2018). Once again, reparations enable us to engage development not as a neocolonial mechanism of control and extraction, but rather as a vehicle for a socialised system of ecological production (including free accessible social infrastructure like education and healthcare) that functions to facilitate solidarity-building, equal access to land, and developing sustainable agriculture (Amin, 2009).

To demand climate aid reparations is to push back against coloniality. This is a daunting task. However, such demands have been made with some success. Bond and Sharife (2009) note that several Latin American governments, at least for some time, were able to break from aid colonialism. They recount how in 2007, Ecuador's government demanded that the Global North pay its ecological debt. The World Bank representative was also expelled from Ecuador and demands were made to “leave the oil in the soil” and to pay $5 billion in compensation. Several South-South solidarity efforts followed in 2009, where foreign aid models were resisted by the presidents of Brazil, Venezuela, Paraguay, Ecuador, and Bolivia. We can, therefore, learn and take inspiration from these examples that rejected climate aid and instead demanded climate reparations for ongoing Global North extraction from the Global South that began in the colonial period. In this respect, climate reparations serve as a mechanism through which to address a series of related social and ecological injustices.

Conclusion

How we respond to climate change and, more importantly, how we build and consolidate a progressive climate justice politics from below will determine the global order in the years to come. We cannot allocate the handling of the climate crisis to those who wield disproportionate power and wealth precisely because climate justice requires that wealth and control be scaled back and socialised. To address climate change meaningfully within the African context, like other contexts marked by a violent, centuries-long history of colonialism, requires redressing this history in a manner that resists and refuses but also builds and constructs (Kelley, 2002). As Táíwò (2022b: 171) writes, to take seriously the climate crisis “is not just to redistribute social advantages,” but also to actively intervene in this crisis, ensuring that the gains made by anti-colonial activists are not reversed. Climate justice is always an issue of socio-economic and political justice, as well as historical reparation.

As we have shown, almost all climate aid – including investments from the global finance sector – is wholly unconcerned with historical redress or meaningful solidarity, favouring instead climate profitably over climate justice. The kinds of sustainable development envisioned by climate aid have been based on the sorts of “green growth” and “green coloniality” (e.g. the billions spent on adaptation and low carbon development; Táíwò, 2022b), which have proven central to contemporary mechanisms of colonial extraction (see Sultana, 2022). The oxymoronic constitution of such “sustainable development” is repeatedly made clear (Nsah, 20232022). Climate reparations would thus represent a more expansive, structural, and historically situated attempt at advancing climate justice.

The climate emergency, Sam et al. (2022) insists, is too urgent to prioritise profits. Action and the building of a decolonising planetary consciousness must be undertaken hastily. In this article, we have explored two alternatives to climate aid colonialism, namely, South-South solidarity and climate reparations. There are, of course, many other ways by which to advance climate justice in the face of climate coloniality. Future climate justice research should strive to better understand and support projects that strengthen and make connections between indigenous ecological knowledges, ecologically just modes of governance, prefigurative ecological lifestyles, and eco-socialist politics that hold the state accountable to climate justice. It is essential that different context-bound climate justice actions are brought into a totality of climate resistance that responds to the political moment swiftly; with each and every climate resistance effort complemented with a constructive vision of a decolonised world.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the University of South Africa Institute for Social and Health Sciences and the South African Medical Research Council–University of South Africa Masculinity and Health Research Unit for their institutional support. The authors also thank those who attended and facilitated the 2023 Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa Publishing Workshop for supporting the writing and conceptualisation of this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Nick Malherbe

Notes

Author Biographies

Nick Malherbe is a researcher at the Institute for Social and Health Sciences, University of South Africa and the South African Medical Research Council-University of South Africa Violence, Injury and Social Asymmetries Research Unit. His research interests include culture, psychological praxis, and visual methods. He works with social movements, cultural workers, and young people. He lives and works in South Africa.

Abiodun Omotayo Oladejo is a researcher at the Walter Sisulu University, South Africa. His primary fields of academic interests include, but are not limited to, climate change and adaptation, energy justice, and the sociology of decolonisation. For over a decade, he has been at the vanguard of environmental justice advocacy in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria.

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Against Climate Aid Colonialism: The Case for Climate Reparations and South-South Solidarity

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Aid Colonialism

Climate Aid Colonialism

Resisting Climate Aid Colonialism: Two Pathways

South-South Solidarity

Climate Reparations

Conclusion

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

Author Biographies

References