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“We are fighting for a future that is not riddled with anxiety and fear that another Haiyan might come anytime”, Marinel Ubaido, a survivor of super typhoon Haiyan, which hit the Philippines in November 2013, said at the final panel of COP26 in Glasgow last month. “We do not deserve to live in fear. We deserve a hopeful future. We demand urgent action.”

Ubaido, along with the majority of those who have contributed the least to the climate crisis but suffer the most, was ultimately ignored by the wealthiest countries who dictated the parameters of the conference.

The power imbalance at the root of COP26’s failures could be seen in the mundane practicalities of attending the conference itself. Many delegates from the countries most vulnerable to the climate crisis were not even present at the conference. Small island states stressed that without vaccination, their delegations could not attend. Whilst those on the frontlines of the crisis were excluded, at least 503 fossil fuel lobbyists for some of the world’s biggest polluting oil and gas giants were granted access to the negotiations.

Other challenges included a lack of available COVID-testing facilities; restrictions on accessing the inner sanctums of the negotiation space; limited civil society observer spaces to scrutinize emerging text; and an absence of corridor influencing, where activists used to have some opportunity to review potential policy proposals. COVID safety measures were a useful proxy for narrowing the decision-making table and invizibilising the process.

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These dynamics didn’t happen by mere coincidence. They were the logical outcome of a multilateral system – which includes institutions like the United Nations, World Bank and International Monetary Fund – whose nature is fundamentally colonial. It is governed by a logic of extraction, privatization and racialized exploitation. It curates a knowledge system where categories, metrics and analytics are produced by those in power. As a consequence, colonial ways of seeing and knowing constitute the evidence and analysis that define the solutions, all constructed to support the view that the richest nations at the helm of the multilateral system care and can be entrusted with solving the crisis.

Net-zero fallacies

The coloniality of the multilateral approach to the climate crisis was most evident in the cornerstone of the Glasgow Pact: the proposal to pursue ‘net zero by 2050’ to achieve the 1.5°C goal. Net zero means that instead of actually decreasing carbon emissions, those who can afford to pay can offset them through emissions trading schemes.

Global South negotiators, such as Bolivia’s chief negotiator, Diego Pacheco Balanz, asserted that this net-zero proposal was a false solution to enable a “great escape” from wealthier countries’ responsibilities to actually reduce carbon emissions. Some climate justice activists also fiercely resisted the proposal, arguing that the ‘net’ in ‘net zero’ delays and deflects from cutting carbon emissions at source while allowing business as usual to flourish through fossil fuels and industrial agriculture. They have also claimed that it could lead to land grabs that dispossess farmers, rural and indigenous communities.

Meanwhile, research shows that almost 80% of climate finance is provided in the form of debt-creating loans, which have soared from $19.8bn in 2013 to $44.5bn in 2019. And 40% of these loans are non-concessional, meaning they are issued on or above market interest rates, or with shorter grace periods.

Sovereign debt is an anchor that entrenches unequal power between North and South. In 2020, 62 Global South countries spent more repaying debt than they did for urgent healthcare needs. The Jubilee Debt Campaign reveals that low-income countries spend five times more on debt than coping with the emergency of climate change. This unjust and devastating cycle demonstrates a multilateral system where the greed of international creditors (such as the IMF, World Bank, and financial corporations and commercial banks including BlackRock and Goldman Sachs) supersedes both the economic and social rights of people and the ability of the South to address climate change. On the other hand, grants, which is the form of climate finance being called for the South and by climate justice movements, amount to just 27% of climate finance, or about $16.7bn.

A new reparative multilateralism

COP26 was a stark clash of ideologies that squashed the Global South’s hopes for a future with climate equity. That clash was between leaders for and against more fossil fuels, for and against more loans instead of financial transfers and essentially those for and against the current economic system. Movements spanning reparations, Black radicalism and feminist fiscal alternatives are calling for, amongst other things, the cancelling of existing debt without attached conditions as a critical next step to enable countries to liberate themselves from the structures of colonialism and as some form of compensation for centuries of harm.

This liberation will require nothing less than revolution to combat colonial policy-making alongside the use of legal mechanisms to bring about restorative justice and reparations. It will also entail the encouragement of hopeful alternatives and the building of parallel institutions on regional and local levels. African scholar Professor Chinweizu posits the need for “self-made repairs, on ourselves: mental repairs, psychological repairs, cultural repairs, organizational repairs, social repairs, institutional repairs… repairs of every type that we need in order to recreate and sustain Black societies.”

Multilateralism as a colonial project involves the loss of contextual and embodied knowledge, where knowing is linked to the lived experience of communities impacted by climate crises and a visceral understanding of painful loss. Dismantling the coloniality of the multilateral system begins with centering the lived experiences, Indigenous wisdoms and regenerative ways of being, practiced by communities who endure the most harm.

A new kind of reparative multilateralism is urgent for the alternative ideas it could bring to the world, and it begins with:

Healing can only begin when deeply entrenched hierarchies rooted in injustice and dehumanization are dismantled. Outside the confines of the current multilateral system, a plurality of knowledge is thriving. It is knowledge that will swell and flow through all the lands and rivers it can reach until it can no longer be ignored.