This month: Decolonising the green transition

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Subject: This month: Decolonising the green transition

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Across continents, communities, thinkers and movements are confronting the false promises of “green growth” and reclaiming justice on their own terms. This month brings together reflections on food sovereignty, decolonial industrial policy, the fight against fossil capitalism, and the defence of life and land; from South Asia to Latin America, and from Gaza to Montevideo.

Illustration by Fourate Chahal El Rekaby

The Green Pakistan Initiative

Green capitalism and rural dispossession in Pakistan

By Zaighum Abbas

On 11 July 2025, as monsoon rains flood Lahore, Pakistan launched the army-backed Green Pakistan Initiative—corporate farms and six new canals in Punjab. Sold as “modernization,” it’s triggering evictions of small farmers, fresh water disputes with Sindh, big Gulf investments, and a growing protest movement led by figures like “Zulfiqar Junior.”

Green Industrialisation as Delinking in Times of Green (Neo)colonialism

By Hamza Hamouchene

On 8–9 October, Montevideo hosted the Uruguay South Initiative, a space for rethinking green industrial policy and global finance from the perspective of the South. Supported by Uruguay’s Ministry of Industry, Energy, and Mining (MIEM), TNI, and the UN System, Hamouchene argues for a people-centred approach to green industrialisation that resists new forms of dependency.

Did Trump Steal Our Agenda?

Why Fighting Free Trade Isn't Enough Anymore

By Luciana Ghiotto

As the European Trade Justice Coalition marks 25 years, this reflection asks an unsettling question: how did the right appropriate the language of anti-globalization? It calls on activists to rethink trade, the state, and strategy for a new cycle of struggle.

“Palestinian liberation is inseparable from the fight against global fossil capitalism”

Hamza Hamouchene highlights how the struggle for Palestinian liberation is bound up with the global fight against fossil capitalism. Both stem from the same structures of extraction and dispossession, requiring solidarity and transformative change.

We Are Also Family

Reflections on building safe spaces across margins

In Myanmar, queer, trans, sex worker, and drug-using communities face intersecting forms of criminalisation, violence, and surveillance. Through the 2024 Initiatives Programme award, DPAG fostered safer spaces as a collective practice of solidarity.

Video

At the UN: Exposing Corporate Power and Defending Global South Leadership

Sol Trumbo Vila & Juliana Rodrigues de Senna

At the United Nations Human Rights Council, TNI intervened to challenge the EU’s rhetoric on democracy and human rights that shields corporate power, and to amplify Global South leadership calling for binding rules to end corporate impunity.

Coca Leaf: Revisiting a 75-Year-Old Injustice

WHO Critical Review of Coca Leaf

Nearly 75 years after the UN called for coca chewing’s abolition, the WHO is finally reassessing coca’s legal status—thanks to Bolivia’s and Colombia’s initiative. This review could reshape global drug policy.

In this overview, we follow recent developments and offer critical commentary.

Illustration by Anđela Janković

Podcast: La OMS y el Proyecto Cocaína

(In Spanish)

Pien Metaal and Mario Argandoña revisit the unpublished 1990s WHO–UNICRI global study on cocaine and coca, revealing its findings and political suppression.

Listen podcast

Fellowship Highlights

Extraction

The Frontiers of Green Capitalism

by Thea Riofrancos

An in-depth investigation into the growing industry of green technologies and the environmental, social, and political consequences of the mining it requires.

Lithium, a crucial input in the batteries powering electric vehicles, has the potential to save the world from climate change. But even green solutions come at a cost. Mining lithium is environmentally destructive. We therefore confront a dilemma: Is it possible to save the world by harming it in the process?

Global Battlefields

Memoir of a Legendary Public Intellectual from the Global South

By Walden Bello

Walden Bello’s memoir traces his journey from student activist to global left thinker, recounting struggles against dictatorship, neoliberalism, and empire—from Manila to Seattle—and reflections on independence, justice, and hope.

The Middle East and Fossil Capitalism

Oil, Militarism and the Global Order

By Adam Hanieh for Transition Security Project

Adam Hanieh’s essay charts the centrality of Middle East oil in the development of US global hegemony and the role of alliances with Israel and Saudi Arabia in US dominance in the Middle East. Hanieh reflects on US attempts to stimulate Israel-Gulf normalisation as a response to the transition towards a multipolar world and the centrality of Palestinian liberation to the struggle against fossil capitalism.

YouTube pick

This Is Not a Peace Deal: It’s a New Occupation

What we're reading

Peace deal or not, Gaza is the Holocaust of our time (Niamh Ni Bhriain)

Scientific distinctions between coca and cocaine support policy reform (Dawson M. White & Martin Jelsma et al.)

A ceasefire has not ended the genocide (Phyllis Bennis & Khury Petersen-Smith)

Another World Was Possible – The Dig Radio (lexandra Wandel Gonzalo Berrón Paul Adlerstein)

Agroecology and the Green Transition – Springer Journal of Agriculture and Human Values (Saturnino M. Borras Jr & Jennifer C. Franco et al.)

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Subject: This month: Decolonising the green transition

Sol Trumbo Vila & Juliana Rodrigues de Senna