The counterinsurgent work of green transition financing in Africa

Abstract

In this contention article, we look at recent events and narratives shaping formal green transition practices in Africa, and interrogate whether financing, demanded by both states and activists, will actually enable a recalibration in the power and energy relations on the continent. Our position is that, against the imperial scaffolding and unequal historical assemblages that are the foundation for the world today, forms of finance—whether as “loss and damages” or the “new global financing pact”—proposed by multiple African actors can serve to deflect and deny local impetus for structural change. We explore the counterinsurgent work of this financing through two key movements: the first is via discussing how energy transition narratives on the continent are increasingly framed as the opportunity for an agential “African Century,” rather than the continuation of racialized extractivism—business as usual. The second is through calling for more radical attention to that which is being off-staged in formal climate conversations: this is the expansion of state violence to enact a “green transition” and in response to communities’ resistance to forms of green coloniality.

Introduction

In this scenario, finance operates as an entanglement of power relations accruing rent from climate devastation and untethered from specific broad development aims that may be democratically determined by Caribbean peoples. (Keston Perry, The new ‘bond-age’)

In his prerecorded welcome address to the first Africa Climate Summit in September 2023, William Ruto, Kenya's President, declared that “our continent will gather to define and refine its fresh and distinctive position regarding how humanity should engage in effective action in order to save the planet from a climate catastrophe and at the same time lift hundreds of millions out of poverty.” ¹ His call was for “green growth and climate finance solutions for Africa and the world,” and in later remarks shared that what was required was “a new global financing pact.” ² This would engage the efforts of an international and unified front to guarantee that no country would have to choose between “its development aspirations and necessary climate action.” ³

Though likely using inclusive discourse to manage dissent, this convening was still the target of protests. Motivating this discontent, and documented in an open letter signed by over 500 African civil society organizations, were demands for a “reset” of the Summit's priorities, which were not perceived as advancing the real interests of African people, and rather putting forward those of the “West” through foreign consulting companies seen as influencing its programming, including McKinsey, World Resources Institute, and The Nature Conservancy. ⁴ This context thus enabled

a Summit agenda that foregrounds the position and interests of the West, namely, carbon markets, carbon sequestration and “climate positive” approaches. These concepts and false solutions are led by Western interests while being marketed as African priorities. In truth, though, these approaches will embolden wealthy nations and large corporations to continue polluting the world, much to Africa's detriment. ⁵

Yet, despite the divergence in the demands for this conference, both the civil society open letter and the Nairobi Declaration, the official document to emerge from African leaders’ discussions at the Summit, would have vital points of convergence. One is the recognition that Africa has historically contributed the least to all greenhouse gas emissions, roughly 4%, but is the region most impacted by climate change. Another, and critical to our argument here, is the statements in support of “climate finance.” In focusing on this shared position, that the historically polluting North should provide climate funds, interestingly expressed by both regional “green growth” advocates inside the Summit and by their dissenters on the street, we are not making false equivalences between the different desires for how these resources are to be spent, nor how they will be defined. Still, we believe that it is important to underscore that what is constant is that this financing is understood as necessary by both parties, and that it should be transferred by Northern governments and their relevant institutions.

Our contention article departs from this point. Here, our core concern is what we see as the contradictions engendered by calls for climate financing, whether pitched as “loss and damages” or “a new global financial pact.” Informed by the work of Dunlap (2020, 2023), which regards the “green economy as counterinsurgency,” and the literatures of Southern scholars such as Sultana (2022), Perry (2021) and Malherbe and Oladejo (2024) that argue against climate (aid) colonialism, our position is that green financing in Africa deflects “the inevitable ecological anxiety that could mobilize for radical social change” (Dunlap, 2020: 39). What's more, since “counterinsurgency is a type of war – ‘low intensity’ or ‘asymmetrical’ – and style of warfare that emphasizes intelligence networks, psychological operations, media manipulation, security provision and social development to maintain governmental and/or extractive legitimacy” (Dunlap, 2020: 41), we detail how these operations on the continent are counterinsurgent in their bids to “manage” (via “media manipulation,” and declarations of “development,” for example) how this transition is understood and responded to, and, critically, because they create the threat and actuality of violence (via “security provision,” “intelligence networks”) against those perceived to be in the way of their objectives. We also anchor our intervention in the work of commentators of the Kenyan postcolonial state, like Mbaria and Ogada (2016) who have detailed the multiple colonial instruments of conservation practices in Africa (for instance, “creative storytelling” and outright displacement and violent repression of indigenous peoples), and Gluck (2019) who asserts that the enduring condition of politics in Kenya (and applicable to many countries in the East African region) continues to be one of counterinsurgency — a state playbook inherited from the British colonial apparatus.

Our position is narrated through two interconnected observations that have emerged from individual and joint research processes, conversations with African energy actors, and participation in the Africa Energy Forum and related convenings. First, we contend that substantive efforts toward social and environmental justice are pacified on the continent when African leaders use the transition discourse to highlight some ostensibly burgeoning African moment. In such a context, performances of a “new” African epoch function as attempts to mask the “business as usual” of racial capitalism, and further enroll African states in a hubris that, without a doubt, deepens the reality of their territories as sacrifice zones and not the “solutions” they position them as. Second, while extremely sympathetic to the calls for “loss and damages,” we argue that the self-interest of those facilitating “theatres of climate colonialism” (Sultana, 2022: 2), for instance COP26 and the Africa Climate Summit, from which such funding is supposed to emerge, is not given enough weight by regional civil society actors who call for these resources. Our concerns echo those of Perry (2021: 361) when they assert that the global platforms for climate change discussions remain “silent on the historical responsibility and continuing coloniality that reproduce uneven and extreme consequences in climate impacted Caribbean communities.” Fundamentally, they remain “impervious to racial formations,” and this is a blindness furthered by local elites. While there may exist a “silence” from global platforms and postcolonial compradors, one that off-stages the reproduction of ongoing colonialities (Ernstson and Swyngedouw, 2019), their force and guns continue to speak, materializing state violence and forceful repression of those who would think to or do otherwise.

As the increase in emissions, despite these “theatres of colonialism,” evidence, Northern states will not suddenly develop a new morality that will ensure the delivery of desired outlays without conditions that advance their own ambitions. That is, and the recent outcomes of COP 29 confirm, if there is any interest on their part in contributing to “loss and damages” or reparations at all (c.f. Perry, 2021). Our argument does not aim to diminish the importance of real dollar assistance for those whose homes and livelihoods have been swept away by floods (a fate suffered by thousands in Kenya, Tanzania and Congo, as but a few examples, in the first few months of 2024), or affected by the drought facing millions across the continent. Instead, through these two related movements, we question whether—against the imperial scaffolding and unequal historical assemblages that are the foundation for the world we have today, what a recent report has termed “structural traps” ⁶ and elsewhere “power relations” ⁷ —the financing demanded by both states and civil society groups will actually enable climate justice redress and a recalibration in the world's economic system that those most impacted by these enduring forms of coloniality demand. ⁸ Echoes of this sentiment can be found in the recently published Manifesto for an Ecosocial Energy Transition from the Peoples of the South, ⁹ when it states:

We hold that the problems of the Global—geopolitical—South are different from those of the Global North and rising powers such as China. An imbalance of power between these two realms not only persists because of a colonial legacy but has deepened because of a neocolonial energy model.

Thus, we ask again: with these sedimented histories, can Africa become, as Kenya's president asserts, “the new torchbearer[s] of the most impactful climate action”? Or will monetary transfers in the name of “green” or “damages” reproduce a death-inducing capitalism (for both humans and nonhumans) in their inability and complete disinterest to push for the holistic repair work necessary for those still caught in what Ferdinand (2021) terms a (slave-ship) hold politics?

Surely, there are other calls made by all referenced here, and particularly those who were kept out of fora such as the (not) Africa Climate Summit. Importantly, these exigencies include fervent statements for “system change not climate change” since:

Climate change and its impacts are linked to our colonial past and imperialist development, which were and still are based on a capitalist, extractivist model. Indeed, the modern economy has created the climate, ecological, economic and social crises we face today. These intersecting crises continue to be deepened by a colonial, patriarchal and neoliberal model of accumulation—driven by a logic of domination, exploitation and destruction of human beings and nature. ¹⁰

These perspectives are necessary and indisputable. Still, the question remains: can we respond and pursue “system change” and successfully negotiate the “soft” and violent pacification that funding—whether for “green growth” or “damages”—can imply? Caught within what Newell and Phillips (2016: 39) refer to as the “structural and disciplinary power of global institutions to set the terms of transition,” will external financing allow for a continent-wide just transition? We ask this not least because of the double speak of the North, which can express the need to respond to climate change while providing 47 billion dollars for fossil fuels in Africa between 2016 and 2019 (or, we can say, since the Paris Agreement); a North that, in 2025, appears committed to further expanding nonrenewable energy production at home (i.e. the Keystone Pipeline in the United States) and abroad (TotalEnergies and the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) connecting Uganda and Tanzania).

In reflecting on these questions, we also shed light on the conflicting ways through which green transition discourse and practices are articulated in formal fora in Africa. On this, we contend that, at the formal state level, this does not reflect a pluriverse of possibilities, and, rather, builds on an exceptionalism that strives to bring together both “exotic” and futuristic accounts: those that vision Africa as the last/next frontier for capitalist expansion, while also continuing narratives of a “dark” and/or “noble savage” continent. Undoubtedly, the consolidation of “silicon” and “savannah” as critical tropes of Kenya's present merges these two views; discursive “out of Africa” regimes are married to a profitable techno-opportunism (c.f. Pollio, 2026) that emphasizes the need to preserve (often militaristically) the world's last “eden[s]” (Marijnen and Verweijen, 2016; Nsah, 2023). Certainly, the articulations and the materialities of the “transition” moment on the continent are full of engineered contradictions enacted through guises that may work to “defang” (Malherbe and Oladejo, 2024) and forcefully defy the rage we so desperately need to push toward more ecologically just futures. To contextualize our position, in the following section we give a broad survey of energy trends in Africa and conclude by reflecting on how these circumstances delimit any possible anticolonial impact of green transition finance and operations in the region.

The context

The African People's Statement on COP 26, which emerged from the African People's Counter COP that took place in 2021, ¹¹ shared that “our continent is being hit by heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, dried soils, cyclones, storms, locust plagues, flooding, sea level rise and other climate-related disasters.” Indeed, Africa is warming fast, and, in the words of Bassey (2012), we are “cooking.” But, across the region, different movements and peoples are waging struggles to defend lands and futures in the face of both fossil fuel deepening and the extractive pursuits of green energy neoliberal solutions (Hamouchene and Sandwell, 2023).

The successful DeCOALonize campaign in Lamu, Kenya, which, for the moment, has stopped the construction of a 1050 MW coal plant on this island world heritage site (an enterprise that would have increased Kenya's greenhouse gas emissions by, at least, 700% ¹² ); the continuous work to prevent and draw attention to the proposed EACOP funded by TotalEnergies and a host of U.S. and Canadian banks and pension funds, ¹³ and the legal success of the communities that demonstrated against the “land grabs” which facilitated the creation of the “largest wind farm in Africa,” ¹⁴ are but a few instances of determined efforts to push for energy transitions that are more people-centered, even in the face of state repression.

At the same time, there are a bevy of prominent voices from the continent that, in contrast, assert that Africa cannot progress without the use of fossil fuels. This is not just because of the sheer relative cost of setting up renewable energy infrastructure—be it, geothermal, wind or solar power, or even the vested interests of different state actors that permit for “competing visions of energy futures” (Newell and Phillips, 2016). But also since, in the words of a former adviser to Ethiopia's Prime Minister, “[…] African countries are entitled to expand their oil and gas capabilities … and the international community does not have the right to say we cannot do this” (quote taken from Kozul-Wright, 2025). Such sentiments confirm a common feeling, which can be interpreted as “we [Africans] should be allowed to use oil and gas to further our economies to the level that others [read Europe, America, Asia] have reached.” Broadly speaking, this position signals that it is the “developed world” that should stop using nonrenewable energy sources because, indeed, it is there that the problem lies, while Africans not only can but should extract oil and gas to create the conditions of possibility for the lives that others already have. An important stated outcome of these fossil fuel pursuits is the reduction of pervasive large-scale energy poverty, and the potential to respond to the present and forthcoming impacts of the runaway climate emergency.

Essentially, as was conveyed to us by a prominent consultant, “Africa needs brown not green” to fast track the “development goals” that allowed many countries to lift millions of people out of socio-economic deprivation (at this point, these interlocutors are naught to recall that African bodies were actually the free fuel over hundreds of years for much of this growth). ¹⁵ Interestingly this outlook exists in tandem with animated gestures for clean energy and “green growth,” and is evident not only in Kenya's hosting of the first Africa Climate Summit, but simultaneously in, for example, its self-fashioning as a renewable energy pioneer because close to 80% of its electricity generation stems from, primarily, geothermal sources. ¹⁶ Congo's self-narration as “le pays solution” to the climate crisis, further affirms the regional purchase of this position. ¹⁷

Correspondingly, Kenya's president, who is also the Chair of the Committee of African Heads of State and Government on Climate Change, writes ¹⁸ :

Africa is bursting with possibilities and a vast endowment of natural resources. The continent's renewable energy potential is 50 times greater than the anticipated global electricity demand for the year 2040. The continent also has over 40% of the global reserves of key minerals for batteries and hydrogen technologies. Africa also has the largest tracts of arable land, and the continent is young, with 70% of the people under 30 years of age. It is time to tap these riches to achieve the aspirations of the people. Opportunity beckons for Africa to make this century the African Century, in which the continent's economies leapfrog by harnessing the vast endowment of clean energy resources. We are ready to leap into a future powered by Africa and demonstrate that the continent can industrialize in a low carbon and sustainable manner [emphasis/italics are our own].

The pursuit of an African path to “save the planet” wobbles under the many local and regional examples of a problematic green expansionism, which are redolent of histories of earlier and ongoing energy colonialism in, for example, Nigeria, Western Sahara, Equatorial Guinea and Angola. In this regard, the actual Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara (see Allan et al., 2022 for more on this); the proliferation of carbon (sink) markets that seek to, purportedly, create “riches” for “the people” yet facilitate the violent displacement of indigenous communities from Congo to Zimbabwe (see Arko, 2024 and Chipato, 2025); the popularity of “efficient” cooking stove companies that profitably monetize the carbon supposedly saved from the reduction in biomass use by rural African women who are sold these burners and then become responsible for an offsetting from which they marginally benefit (Wang and Corson, 2015); the rush to extract lithium in Tanzania for building electric batteries for vehicles (Hairsine, 2023); the intensification of cobalt mining in the Congo, and plans by German and U.K. capital to produce “green hydrogen” via wind and photovoltaic power parks along the coast of Namibia, shipping most of it as ammonia to the port of Rotterdam (Rischer, 2025; cf. Müller, 2023)—all of these events underscore that declarations of a green “African Century” and what it can portend barely track with the actual “aspirations of the people.” Instead, as Dunlap (2023: 42) argues, these machinations of the “green economy” are really “a refusal of the demands of the people, ecosystems and the planet, instead doubling-down and intensifying the current capitalist trajectory of colonial control and extractivism.”

A (counterinsurgent) future powered by Africa?

Between 20 and 23 June 2023, the Africa Energy Forum was held on the continent for the first time, after an over 20-year existence (a reality that already proves much of the unequal dynamics we are seeking to evidence here). In its Nairobi iteration, “strategic areas” covered included: “energy for mining, connectivity, the just transition, and Africa's potential as a global hydrogen powerhouse.” ¹⁹ At this platform, it was documented that a number of memoranda of understanding were signed and funding pledged, including that by “Power Africa” which, in its own words, ²⁰ is “a U.S. government-led partnership, Power Africa harnesses the collective resources of public and private sectors to double access to electricity in sub-Saharan Africa.” Critical to register here is that key to this provision of electricity is the discernment of “bankable deals” for the U.S. private sector, through associations such as the U.S-Africa Clean Tech Energy Network that “connects U.S and African cleantech energy companies to market opportunities where technology can increase access to reliable electricity.” Following the Power Africa pledge at the Africa Energy Forum, a March 2024 conference in Washington DC, convened by Power Africa, carried the motto: “capital flows underpinning the energy transition.” ²¹ Not coincidentally, at the June 2023 meeting that preceded the Africa Climate Summit by two months, President Ruto spoke about the salience of Africa in the world's future (techno-capitalist) energy trajectories. Here, he highlighted that, indeed, the “future is powered by African energy.” Even so, a survey of the lead sponsors, which include TotalEnergies, the European Investment Bank and a host of other multinational corporations and private investment groups, challenges the “[green] African Century” pronounced by Kenya's president.

Without a doubt, even with the contradictions that shape the territorialization of formal green transition discourses in the region, the future may likely be powered by Africa, but not through modes that shift power to the continent, nor ones that allow for repair(ations) or redress. Rather, if ever materialized, “loss and damages” and a new “financial pact” for an “African Century” may just function to “maintain governmental and extractive legitimacy” (Dunlap, 2020: 664), “cement[ing] uneven circuits of global capital” (Perry, 2021: 362). Parallel to the proliferating current green financial operations, these interventions would be operationalized through both “media manipulation” (Dunlap, 2020: 39) and “creative storytelling” (Mbaria and Ogada, 2016), but also via the preferred counterinsurgent armory of states: for example, they would be akin to and emerge outcomes such as the evictions of the Ogiek in Kenya because of their refusal that their land be expropriated for carbon credits (Marshall, 2023); the killing of a protestor, involved in protests against a wind farm in Kinangop, by the police (Capital FM, 2015); the enduring “green militarization” of Virunga National Park in Congo for “sustainable development” (Marijnen and Verweijen, 2016).

Ultimately, the capital flows and materialities of green interventions will not systematically chip at the same structures that make us demand energy transitions and prompt our climate emergencies in the first place. Since they are contingent on a “legitimacy construction” (Dunlap, 2023: 47) that positions “governments, corporations and NGOs [as] the only way to stop climate catastrophe” (Dunlap, 2023: 42), the genuine will of African people for redress is muted and maimed, allowing for a situation where, borrowing from Ruto's own words, we continue “replicating mistakes of the past and expecting new results.” ²²