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Reviewed book: The Geopolitics of Green Colonialism: Global Justice and Ecosocial Transitions, 1st edition, 2024 – by Miriam Lang, Mary Ann Manahan and Breno Bringel (eds.)
Book review by Veronica Calienno
Multifarious and thought-provoking, The Geopolitics of Green Colonialism is a concerted effort by some of the world’s leading critics of neoliberal environmental politics to expose the dark side of the global energy transition.
Striving to voice socioecological perspectives often underrepresented in the mainstream climate discourse, the book brings together scholars, activists, intellectuals and community organisers from - or with longstanding experience in - the Global South. These include Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the Universidad Andina Bolívar Miriam Lang, doctoral assistant at Ghent University Mary Ann Manahan and Professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro Breno Bringel as editors, together with leading academics of political ecology such as Arturo Escobar and Ulrich Brand as contributors. Backed by this strong interdisciplinary, internationalist approach, the book seeks to unpack the material and ideological foundations of green capitalism and climate coloniality, while presenting alternative visions offered by social movements and frontline communities in the Global South.
Central to the book are two key arguments. First, the world is undergoing a “new hegemonic phase of tech-based and corporate-led green colonial capitalism” in which the capitalist logic of extraction and exploitation extends into climate action, turning it into an accumulation strategy (p. 6). The interplay of capitalism and environmentalism materialises into what authors term the “decarbonisation consensus” – a global coalition of institutional and corporate actors that frames the ongoing market-driven energy transition as the only solution to climate change (p.2). Building on nature capitalisation, technocratic discourse, and the reduction of ecological complexity to carbon metrics, this consensus ignores calls for a truly just transition and marginalises alternative socioecological visions.
Second, the authors argue that this extractivist form of environmentalism is inherently colonial, as it reinforces global power asymmetries by appropriating Global South resources to sustain the North’s “imperial mode of living” throughout its green transition (p.10). As the latest stage of green colonialism, climate coloniality justifies this process by framing resource extraction and exploitation as an unavoidable step towards decarbonisation. The Global South is thus reified as an endless supplier of raw materials, a ground for waste-dumping and large-scale renewable projects catering to Northern interests, and a new market for green technologies.
The Geopolitics of Green Colonialism’s structure follows three movements: deconstruction, analysis, and reconstruction. The first part examines the advancement of green colonialism by unravelling the hegemonic decarbonisation project from a political economy perspective. It explains how Northern green policies drive extractivism in the South (ch. 1), looking into concrete forms of green colonialism with examples from lithium extraction in Latin America (ch. 2) and land grabs in North Africa (ch. 3). The Global North's climate agenda is extensively critiqued for externalising environmental costs and overrelying on the idea of net-zero rather than addressing overconsumption and designing a more sustainable mode of living (ch. 4-5).
In the second part diverse theoretical approaches – including state theory, feminist and decolonial thought, and Pan-Africanism – are adopted to explore structural dependencies that hinder just transitions in the Global South. The section identifies persisting (post)colonial economic structures and ideologies underlying the reproduction of green colonialism: unequal ecological exchange (ch. 6), financial subordination (ch. 7), postcolonial state apparatuses (ch. 8), developmentalism (ch. 9), neoliberal trade (ch. 10) and global environmental stakeholderism (ch. 11).
The final section presents alternative pathways for just socioecological transitions. Proposals span from rethinking energy systems through a human-rights perspective (ch. 12) to embracing an African eco-feminist politics of hope (ch. 13) and reconceptualising social reproduction and labour through a degrowth lens (ch. 14-15). Case studies from Bangladesh (ch. 16) and Colombia (ch. 17) highlight grassroots resistance to the Decarbonization Consensus. The volume concludes with a call for eco-territorial internationalism (ch. 19), a global justice vision that challenges both capitalist modernity and colonial legacies.
By arguing that market-driven decarbonisation is inherently unable to achieve global justice and ecological balance, The Geopolitics of Green Colonialism successfully casts doubt on the inescapability of a capitalist, extractivist transition and reveals the possibility of transformations from below. The volume’s merit lies particularly in its pluralistic approach, which allows different ideas to enter into dialogue against the background of a common understanding of historical power asymmetries and critical economic theory. By incorporating diverse perspectives without imposing rigid ideological coherence, editors answer to the call – first made by leading scholar Arturo Escobar – to develop a "pluriversal ontology for socio-ecological transformations". Escobar, who also co-authored a chapter in this volume, theorised that countering capitalism’s one-world ontology and its monolithic, extractivist vision for the energy transition requires opening to a pluriverse of socioecological designs for different, non-hierarchical models of transition. The Geopolitics of Green Colonialism takes up this challenge, offering a solid example of how this transformative idea can be put into practice academically and stylistically.
However, this pluralism also bears some weaknesses. Despite the merit of successfully combining heterogeneous contributions, the breadth of short essays limits depth, resulting in an occasional fragmentation of its structure. The strength of the book’s thesis is also partially hindered by its dichotomic view on the current debate on climate-induced socioeconomic change. By positioning the decarbonisation consensus as the only dominant force, authors end up arguably underplaying other influential forces, such as fossilist developmentalism and climate denialism. In an era of Green Deal fatigue, Trumpian climate rollback and Southern resistance to green policies, portraying green capitalism as the universal, uncontested agenda of the global capitalist elite seems reductive and short-sighted.
Despite these critiques, The Geopolitics of Green Colonialism remains a crucial intervention in academic climate discourse. It dismantles the myth that the green transition is inherently just and exposes colonial continuities with unprecedented attention to Global South’s voices. More importantly, it does not stop at critique – it offers tangible alternatives grounded in the lived experiences of those resisting ecological injustice. For anyone concerned with the intersection of climate politics, capitalism and global justice, this volume is an essential read and a call to reimagine a pluriverse of radically different futures.
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