[photo is Walden Bello]
It’s all too easy for us living in the insular United States to ignore or make a lot of assumptions on where our climate change allies from the less developed nations (aka the “Global South”) are at. There’s also a lot of claiming of ideas as “new” that have actually been simmering for a long time outside of the narrow confines of our experience.
I’ve seen more than a few posts here speaking of the “needs” or “demands” of the developing world as if there is an established consensus. Meanwhile, outside of a few elites from the South, voices of people actually living in the developing world remain largely unheard here. Is this not a sort of “new colonialism“, where ideas are alternately robbed or impressed upon marginalized people’s in much the same way resources and customs have been in the past?
And of course colonialism, new and old, continues today. Case in point, many of us living from North America may not be aware that The World Bank, an organization controlled by the Global North that is charged with spearheading many of the energy industry developments in the Global South — “sustainable” or otherwise — held it’s critical spring meetings this week in Washington, DC.
It’s noteworthy that the United Nations climate chief Yvo de Boer was in attendance, a fact that speaks to the growing role of the World Bank in climate policy and politics.
But enough chatter from YAWGB (Yet Another White Guy Blogger) from the world’s only superpower! Read on for some links to recent analysis from Focus on the Global South, an organization with staff in Thailand, the Philippines and India that focuses on issues of global inequality, and increasingly the relationship between inequality, climate change, and energy policy.
Some recent articles:
WHERE’S THE HEAT? AN OUTSIDER’S VIEW OF THE BANGKOK CLIMATE TALKS
by Nicola Bullard and Bea Moraras
CHINA’S ECOLOGICAL TIME BOMB
by Dorothy-Grace Guerrero
WILL CAPITALISM SURVIVE CLIMATE CHANGE?
by Walden Bello
IS THE WORLD BANK PROFITEERING ON BOGUS CARBON CREDITS? WORLD BANK CLIMATE PROFITEERING
by Daphne Wysham and Shakuntala Makhijani
CENTRAL PLANNING AND MARKET FREEDOM: MANIFESTATIONS OF THE SAME FUNDAMENTALIST MINDSET
by Walden Bello
Some links to other groups looking at the connections between colonialism and the environment. These allies deserve our utmost support.
Black Mesa Indigenous Support
Carbon Trade Watch
Climate Justice Chicago
Global Forest Coalition
Global Justice Ecology Project
Indigenous Environmental Network
Native Movement
Oil Watch
Root Force
SinksWatch
Via Campesina
Western Shoshone Defense Project
World Rainforest Movement
Please add more in comments!
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For those interested on how the World Bank manipulates research to further its project of “Development”. I would recommend sociologist Michael Goldman’s unprecedented “ethnography” of the Bank and its employees in his book Imperial Nature. A great history of the shift in the Bank’s policy position from sustainability and human rights are “not our business” to claiming that their agenda is the ONLY road to sustainability. By firing researches whose findings contradict their projects, tailoring which parts of reports are published or buried, and withholding raw data as “proprietary” the Bank pushes through dams, indigenous forced relocations, and other projects that make huge profits for western contractors, give developed nations greater access to natural resources, and create disaster for locals.
An old professor of mine started using the book around the time the Bank tried to hire him to rubber stamp an assessment of their Indonesian forestry schemes.