The Colonial Roots of Climate Injustice in Africa: A United Front for Strategic Repositioning of the Global South

17 01 2025 | 07:47Lena Krause / THE MAGHRIB PODCAST
In this lecture, Dr. Fadhel Kaboub identifies the political and economic dynamics between the Global North and South since the wave of African independence in mid-20th century, by which the former has continued its colonial methods of resource extraction, steering the economies of the latter towards dependence on European and American technology and financing. By drawing on examples of large-scale agricultural and energy projects in Ethiopia, Namibia, and Uganda, Dr. Kaboub outlines the process by which African, Latin American, and Middle Eastern resources are captured by foreign energy companies. As Dr. Kaboub explains, poor countries are prevented from developing a domestic manufacturing base, rendering them dependent on companies from the industrialized economies of the Global North, which both produce the technology necessary for resource-harvesting and conduct post-extraction processing or refinement. As such, economies of the Global South are intentionally prevented from industrializing and are instead encouraged to invest heavily in primary resources for subsequent extraction by actors from the Global North. In the final part of his presentation, Dr. Kaboub dedicates his attention to the “carbon credit” scheme, by which large Western energy companies purchase the right to pollute, which they offset by preventing pollution (read: industrialization) in the Global South, in what amounts to painting an environmentally-friendly veneer over the same colonial process.

Fadhel Kaboub is an associate professor of economics at Denison University, and the president of the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. He is the author of  Global South Perspectives on substack. He is also a member of theIndependent Expert Group on Just Transition and Development, an expert group member with the Global Solidarity Levies Task Force, a member of the Earth4All 21st Century Transformational Economics Commission, a Steering Committee member with the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, and a member of the Independent Expert Group on Just Transition Finance. He has recently served as Under-Secretary-General for Financing for Development at the Organisation of Southern Cooperation in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Dr. Kaboub is an expert on designing public policies to enhance monetary and economic sovereignty in the Global South, build resilience, and promote equitable and sustainable prosperity. His recent work focuses on Just Transition, Climate Finance, and transforming the global trade, finance, and investment architecture. His most recent co-authored publication is Just Transition: A Climate, Energy, and Development Vision for Africa (May 2023). He has held a number of research affiliations with the Levy Economics Institute (NY), the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University (MA), the Economic Research Forum(Cairo), Power Shift Africa (Nairobi), African Forum on Climate Change, Energy and Development (Abuja), and the Center for Strategic Studies on the Maghreb (Tunis). You can follow him on LinkedIn, X/Twitter, Bluesky, YouTube, and TikTok @FadhelKaboub. 

This podcast was recorded on the 9th of March 2024, at the Centre d’Études Maghrébines à Tunis (CEMAT) with Dr. Max Ajl, Senior Fellow at the Department of Conflict and Development Studies, Ghent University, researcher with the Observatoire de la Souveraineté Alimentaire et l’Environnement (OSAE), and research fellow at the Merian Center for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb (MECAM).

Cover photo: From Maghrib podcast

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