Globally, the economy remains structured around unequal exchanges, with the Global South providing resources and debt payments that exceed foreign aid received. The Democratic Republic of the Congo illustrates this contradiction: despite supplying much of the cobalt used in electric vehicle batteries, it remains economically disadvantaged.
Without addressing these inequalities, the transition to a low-carbon economy risks reproducing existing patterns of extraction.
Building alternative paradigms
If decolonising economics involves questioning dominant assumptions and recognising extractive systems, it also requires asking what economic thinking might look like beyond those frameworks.
This begins by expanding what counts as economic knowledge. Perspectives from the Global South, including dependency theory, as well as contributions from Muslim thinkers and other non-European scholars, offer alternative ways of understanding development, wealth and economic relationships.
These perspectives often emphasise economic approaches that value people, communities and ecosystems over economic productivity. They place greater value on social well-being, ecological sustainability and collective prosperity.
This approach informs policies such as economic reconciliation through greater Indigenous access to capital, resources and opportunities; climate justice measures that recognise unequal responsibility for environmental damage; and debt cancellation for debts incurred by governments without the consent of their people.
As journalist Nick Romeo has documented, alternative economic models already exist across the globe. They include true-cost pricing that reflects environmental and social impacts, job guarantee programs that address community needs and publicly owned digital platforms for gig work.
Others include worker co-operatives that narrow wage gaps between CEOs and workers, purpose-based companies that prioritise affordable housing and other social goals over profit maximisation, and participatory budgeting that gives citizens a direct role in public spending decisions.
Decolonising economics is a process that rests on challenging Eurocentric economic ideas, recognising systems of extraction, highlighting ideas from the Global South and building alternative models.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
