Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt

Working Paper

 1. Introduction: Climate Leadership, Investment and the Politics of Framing

Over the past several years, African climate diplomacy has been increasingly organised around a recurring triad of “leadership”, “opportunity” and “solutions provision”, a patterned language that now structures how Africa’s role in global climate governance is publicly articulated. Across African Union (AU) climate strategies and Africa Climate Summit communications, Africa is no longer presented primarily as a site of climate vulnerability, but as a central actor in delivering global climate solutions. In particular, its renewable energy potential, along with natural carbon sinks, critical minerals, green industrialisation and a young workforce are invoked to position the continent as indispensable to the global transition. This reframing has been widely welcomed as a corrective to narratives of victimhood, largely because it repositions African climate claims within a language that resonates with investment-oriented approaches to climate action and functions to shift the burden of climate action from the public budgets of developed nations to private markets and the balance Balance End of year statement of a company’s assets (what the company possesses) and liabilities (what it owes). In other words, the assets provide information about how the funds collected by the company have been used; and the liabilities, about the origins of those funds. sheets of developing countries.

Notably, this solutions-oriented register is no longer confined to investment-facing platforms, but is increasingly visible in procedural spaces explicitly intended to address Africa’s special needs and special circumstances. During a COP30 Presidency–convened consultation on Africa’s Special Needs and Special Circumstances (SNSC), a forum formally anchored in recognition of historical responsibility, differential capacity, weak coping mechanisms and structural vulnerability, multiple interventions, including from the African Union Commission and the African Development Bank, framed Africa not only in terms of need, but also as a provider of climate solutions through initiatives such as clean cooking, carbon markets and green industrial pathways. While these contributions were often presented as affirmations of African agency, their prominence within an SNSC-setting signals a subtle but important shift: the language of leadership and solutions increasingly coexists with and at times displaces the redistributive and responsibility-based logic that originally underpinned Africa’s claim to special consideration.

This paper argues that the growing emphasis on securing “a place in global climate leadership” [1] warrants closer political-economic scrutiny. Across African Union Commission communications and the First and Second Africa Climate Summits, Africa describes itself as possessing “both the potential and the ambition to be a vital component of the global solution to climate change” [2] and as a “continent not only a key actor but a global leader” [3]. While such language of leadership appears empowering, the underlying problematisation of Africa’s climate challenge consistently orients responses toward market-oriented strategies. One example is rising climate financialisation, particularly through investment attraction, emissions trading Market activities
trading Buying and selling of financial instruments such as shares, futures, derivatives, options, and warrants conducted in the hope of making a short-term profit. and other market-based instruments that load more foreign loans onto the continent. Fundamental structural constraints rooted in illegitimate debt, unequal terms of trade and “unequal ecological exchange” [4] (Hickel, 2020; UNCTAD UNCTAD
United Nations Conference on Trade and Development This was established in 1964, after pressure from the developing countries, to offset the GATT effects.

, 2025; Bond Bond A bond is a stake in a debt issued by a company or governmental body. The holder of the bond, the creditor, is entitled to interest and reimbursement of the principal. If the company is listed, the holder can also sell the bond on a stock-exchange. , 2025), and rejection of historical “polluter pays” responsibility are worsening. Those supportive of “ecological modernisation” [5] correspondingly reframe the solutions within alleged gaps in capital flows, a changing financing landscape, investment attractiveness, project pipelines and bankability. As a result, financial “mobilisation”, instead of grant “provision” [6], comes to constitute the primary pathway through which climate action is negotiated and legitimatised.

Conceptually, the analysis draws on two complementary bodies of scholarship. First, it utilises insights from the critique of development discourse by Ferguson (1990) to examine how political-economic struggles are displaced into technical and managerial framings. As such, “apolitical” problem-definitions can be produced through a selective construction of reality that is plausible enough to travel, yet partial enough to make a particular intervention package appear self-evident. Applied to contemporary climate governance, this lens helps illuminate how Africa is rendered as a portfolio of mitigation supply, clean energy potential, carbon sinks, green minerals and investable projects, even as the structural conditions shaping fiscal capture and distributive outcomes are pushed out of frame. This is visible in summit language that simultaneously frames Africa as a “vital component of the global solution” and commits to policies and incentives aimed at “attracting… global investment” as a core response (The Nairobi Declaration, 2023).

Second, the paper draws on Michel Foucault’s analysis of power/knowledge and the rule-governed conditions (1980; 1982) under which discourse becomes authoritative, so as to examine what follows once climate action is financialised [7]. When investment mobilisation becomes the dominant mode of problematisation and solution framing, authority gravitates toward actors fluent in finance and markets and toward instruments that translate political claims into “bankable” project forms. This is not to suggest that financialisation becomes dominant because of discourse alone. [8] Rather, discourse is treated as one modality through which already-existing political-economic structures, including the ideologies of international financial institutions, capital accumulation, neoliberal policy regimes and the broader global political economy, are rendered authoritative and legitimate within the imperatives of capital accumulation. The paper acknowledges widely established notions in critical political-economy scholarship that ecological degradation and climate crisis are not external failures of the market but are structurally produced and managed within the same accumulation-driven logics that now organise climate governance. [9] In this sense, financialisation is dominant not because of discourse; discourse becomes dominant because climate governance is already organised around financialised logics.

This dynamic is consistent with summit framings that (a) elevate Africa as a “global leader” in the just energy transition, while (b) repeatedly centre investment, catalytic finance and high-integrity carbon markets as governance pathways. In this register, demands such as de-risking and blended finance gain legitimacy, while claims framed as climate debt, reparations, debt cancellation, or unconditional grant-based adaptation finance are more easily cast as unrealistic or excessive. Together, these two lenses move the paper beyond rhetorical critique and toward an analysis of how climate narratives redistribute authority and structure what can be demanded as “credible” climate leadership.

Empirically, the paper focuses on the Africa Climate Summits (ACS) and associated African Union climate communications not as sites where the “Africa as climate solutions leader” narrative originates, but as key arenas through which externally produced ideas are internalised and legitimatised at continental level. The analysis situates the emergence of this framing in Global North-based neoliberal think tanks and traces its apparent transmission into African policy space through intermediaries such as McKinsey & Company in the lead-up to ACS1. Against this backdrop, the paper examines how the solutions-leader narrative is operationalised through a set of interlocking pillars that align climate action with market-based finance, private investment and bankable projects, thereby shifting responsibility away from public finance obligations embedded in the Paris Agreement.

It is important to note that the “climate solutions leader” narrative does not operate in an uncontested discursive field. The period under examination has also been marked by significant counter-mobilisations and alternative political claims, including organised civil society resistance to the Nairobi agenda and its outcomes, the growing prominence of climate reparations and debt justice narratives, strategic litigation against major historical emitters and landmark advisory ruling before the International Court of Justice. These dynamics signal the presence of competing logics that challenge the financialised and investment-centred framing of climate action. This paper does not deny the existence or political significance of these contestations. Rather, its analytical focus is on how the solutions narrative has come to be institutionalised and rendered legible within African Union-led summit processes and official climate communications, even amid such resistance. A systematic analysis of counter-hegemonic mobilisation and its effects lies beyond the scope of this article.

This paper is structured as follows. Section 2 traces the emergence of the “climate solutions leader” framing across recent summits and African Union communications. Section 3 adopts the Ferguson framework to show how climate politics are depoliticised through processes of financialisation. Section 4 unpacks the core pillars through which Africa is rendered a solutions provider and identifies political-economic fault lines where the narrative frays in practice. Section 5 applies a Foucauldian analysis of power to examine who benefits from this framing and how authority is redistributed. Section 6 concludes by re-anchoring Africa’s climate position in the political claim of Special Needs and Special Circumstances and by advancing an Afrocentric normative-political refusal grounded in policy space and narrative sovereignty, rather than market logics alone.

 2. Tracing the “Climate Solutions Leadership” Narrative across ACS1 and ACS2 Declarations and AU-led Communications

This section traces how the “solutions” narrative is internalised and legitimatised in the two Africa Climate Summits (ACS1 and ACS2) through their official declarations. It shows, first, how the Nairobi Declaration (ACS1) frames Africa as a “vital component of the global solution to climate change” and links that claim to climate-compatible growth and investment mobilisation. Second, it shows how the Addis Ababa Declaration (ACS2) explicitly builds upon the Nairobi Declaration, repeats the “not merely a victim” framing and institutionalises and expands the coupling of “solutions” language with financing, investment and market architectures, such as high-integrity carbon markets and catalytic finance.

2.1 ACS1 (Nairobi, 2023): Assembling the Investment-Led Narrative

The African Leaders Nairobi Declaration (African Union, 2023) is unequivocal in asserting Africa’s role as part of the global solution set. It states that “Africa possesses both the potential and the ambition to be a vital component of the global solution to climate change”, grounding this claim in demographics, renewables and “natural assets”. The Declaration further frames this “solutions” role through an industrial and growth horizon, including the aspiration to “spearhead a climate compatible pathway” as an industrial hub that can support other regions’ net zero ambitions.

For the political-economic argument advanced in this paper, the Nairobi Declaration repeatedly translates this solution framing into an investment-oriented programme. It calls for “climate-positive investments” that catalyse a growth trajectory and enable African countries to reach middle-income status by 2050. It also commits African states to adopt policies and incentives aimed explicitly at “attracting local, regional and global investment in green growth”. Alongside this, the Nairobi Declaration advances an agenda in which finance architecture, market instruments and valuation frameworks are positioned as the route to scale. This includes explicit support for de-risking and blended finance instruments to crowd in private capital.

It also calls for revaluation of GDP GDP
Gross Domestic Product Gross Domestic Product is an aggregate measure of total production within a given territory equal to the sum of the gross values added. The measure is notoriously incomplete; for example it does not take into account any activity that does not enter into a commercial exchange. The GDP takes into account both the production of goods and the production of services. Economic growth is defined as the variation of the GDP from one period to another. through the valuation of “natural capital” and ecosystem services, including forests that sequester carbon, as a means to “unlock new sources of wealth”. In this way, Nairobi sets out a concrete grammar through which solutions are rendered measurable and financeable.

2.2 ACS2 (Addis Ababa, 2025): Consolidating the Solutions–Financing Coupling

The Addis Ababa Declaration (African Union, 2025) is explicit that ACS2 is a continuation of ACS1 and that it “builds upon” the Nairobi Summit and the Nairobi Declaration. It recognises that the Nairobi Declaration underscored Africa’s demand for “global climate justice” and “equitable financing”, while also committing ACS2 to the theme of “Accelerating Global Climate Solutions and Financing for Africa’s Resilient and Green Development”.

The Addis Declaration deepens the rhetorical move away from “victimhood” by stating that Africa is “not merely a victim of climate change but a resource-endowed and proactive force in developing innovative, sustainable and inclusive solutions”. It then links this repositioning to an economic strategy: striving to become a “global hub” for low-carbon manufacturing and green intra-Africa trade and pursuing a “green first pathway” to economic development.

At the same time, Addis makes the financing architecture more explicit and more institutionalised than Nairobi. It calls out the shortfalls and gaps in adaptation finance and stresses that adaptation finance delivery should avoid “debt-creating instruments” and be anchored in reform of the international financial architecture. It also urges reforms to enable “mobilization of African private capital” for green industrialisation and climate action.

Most importantly for the “financialisation” storyline, Addis openly embraces carbon market expansion within a governance and integrity register, including the need to “expand high-integrity carbon markets” and establish benefit-sharing mechanisms for communities. It also records a commitment to catalytic finance through new institutional vehicles, including an initiative “committing to mobilize US$50 billion annually in catalytic finance to champion climate solutions”.

2.2.3 AU Press Release (2025): Legitimising Africa’s Global Climate Leadership Narrative

A press release from the AU (14 September 2025) boldly declared that “Africa claims its place in global climate leadership”, announcing multi-billion-dollar commitments to finance locally led climate solutions.

The framing actively reproduces the summits’ narratives in which Africa is repositioned “not as a victim” but as a “driver of solutions” and “the next global climate economy”, with the leaders’ declaration described as a “historic moment” that puts Africa “at the forefront” of global climate action. This repetition is reinforced through claims that the continent has moved “from crisis to opportunity” and “from aid to investment”, coupled with the assertion that Africa is “the actor and architect” of climate solutions.

In this rendering, Africa’s global role is performed through confident proclamations of leadership and solution provision, while legitimacy is tethered to investment-scaled pathways and catalytic finance logics presented as the vehicle through which African-led action becomes actionable at continental scale.

2.3 What “Leadership” is Doing Here: Legibility, Investability and the Narrowing of Legitimate Claims

Considering the two summits’ outcomes, the Nairobi and Addis Declarations show a patterned construction of African climate leadership. Firstly, leadership is asserted through Africa’s potential (renewables, “natural assets”, workforce, carbon sink) and through repositioning Africa as a central contributor to global decarbonisation, despite the fact that most African countries (with the exception of South Africa) are low emitters in production-based accounting terms. [10] In this framing, Africa’s “contribution” to decarbonisation is less about reducing high domestic emissions and more about supplying mitigation assets, green energy, carbon sinks and critical minerals to the global transition. By contrast, many emissions associated with fossil fuel, oil and coal exploration and export from the continent [11] would, under consumption-based accounting, be attributed largely to consuming economies in the Global North. Secondly, leadership is operationalised through the language of scale and mobilisation: attracting investment, de-risking private capital and building finance architectures and market mechanisms (including carbon markets).

This paper’s distinction between justice rhetoric and policy operational pathways is vital. The declarations do include justice language, including explicit reference to equitable financing, reform of the global financial architecture and the need for developed countries to take the lead on mitigation and Addis acknowledges severe adaptation gaps. Yet across both summits, the dominant operational pathways repeatedly return to “investment”, “carbon markets”, “capital at scale” as the mechanisms through which climate action is imagined and legitimatised.

The coexistence of redistributive justice rhetoric with financialised operational pathways therefore raises a deeper question: how is this tension stabilised within summit governance without producing overt rupture? The repeated invocation of equitable finance and reform of the global financial architecture, despite persistent reliance on private capital mobilisation and carbon markets, illustrates a managed cognitive dissonance within financialised climate governance. Justice claims are retained at the level of declaration, while operational authority is anchored in instruments that render those claims structurally improbable within the prevailing paradigm. Nor are calls to “mobilise finance at scale” new in climate diplomacy. Their repetition across summit declarations matters analytically because mobilisation language can signal urgency and responsiveness even where delivery remains partial and uneven. Section 3 returns to this as part of the anti-politics work performed by financialised climate governance.

2.4 Summits as Narrative Legitimatisation Sites: from Declarations to a Governing Common Sense

Finally, both documents explicitly position the Summit as a recurring continental platform for setting Africa’s “vision” and for projecting that vision into the UNFCCC process. Nairobi resolves to establish the Africa Climate Summit as a biennial event to set the continent’s vision and notes that the Declaration will serve as a strong African contribution to COP processes.

Addis echoes this continuity by locating itself as a formal successor, building upon ACS1’s Declaration and reaffirming continental unity under CAHOSCC’s political leadership for “climate solutions and financing”. This matters because it clarifies what is at stake in analysing the “climate solutions leader” framing. The narrative is not incidental branding. It is produced in high-level declarations that define what counts as serious climate action, how Africa is to be seen and which solution pathways are elevated as feasible. In both Nairobi and Addis, Africa is made legible not only as a site of harm and need, but as a structured portfolio of solutions that can be financed, de-risked, valued and channelled through investment and market infrastructures.

 3. Anti-Politics and the Financialisation of Climate Action

The preceding section established how African climate leadership is articulated through summit declarations that foreground solutions and investment. This section turns to the governing logic that underpins this framing. Rather than treating the “climate solutions leader” narrative as mere rhetoric, it examines how it restructures climate politics by redefining what counts as a problem and which responses are rendered legitimate. Drawing on critical political economy and development discourse scholarship, the analysis shows how distributive conflict is increasingly translated into technical questions of coordination, finance and implementation, producing a form of depoliticisation that operates through financialisation rather than denial.

3.1 Who Defines “Truth” and “Knowledge” within Power?

Within this financialised problematisation, authority increasingly accrues to advisory firms that translate political objectives into investment-ready knowledge. Firms such as the US-headquartered McKinsey & Company played a prominent role in this process in the lead-up to ACS1, producing strategic frameworks that recast Africa’s climate challenge in terms of market opportunity and bankability. These forms of expertise both inform policy choices and actively shape what comes to be recognised as a “credible” climate solution, even as their influence has been contested by non-state actors. [12]

In Foucauldian terms, the significance of such actors lies in their location within regimes of knowledge that determine what can be said and acted upon as true. Power operates here through the production of authoritative problem-definitions and solution frameworks that structure the field of possible action, privileging certain pathways. Such neoliberal think tanks function as technical intermediaries that translate the priorities of capital and multilateral finance into policy narratives that become legitimised through African climate summits and the African Union Commission, configured into African negotiation positions and taken up by states operating under conditions of fiscal constraint and temporal pressure.

3.2 From Political-Economy Contestation to Technical Coordination

To analyse how problems are defined and responses legitimatised, the paper draws on James Ferguson’s critique of development discourse as an “anti-politics machine,” in which deeply political questions of power and responsibility are displaced into technical domains of management, coordination and expertise.

In the climate context, this displacement occurs without denial of injustice or inequality. Summit declarations explicitly acknowledge Africa’s vulnerability and adaptation by calling for equity Equity The capital put into an enterprise by the shareholders. Not to be confused with ’hard capital’ or ’unsecured debt’. . What changes is the problematisation. Climate injustice is no longer framed primarily as a question of liability or historical obligation, but as a challenge of mobilisation: how to scale finance, attract investment, design bankable projects and align incentives across public and private actors. Political conflict is thus reframed as a technical coordination problem within investment-oriented governance architectures.

3.3 “Rearranging Reality” [13]: Legibility and Intervention Packages

A central insight of the anti-politics framework is that depoliticisation operates through the production of legibility for intervention. Climate problems are framed in ways that privilege elements that can be quantified and acted upon within existing institutional and financial architectures, while more politically contentious conditions are acknowledged but relegated to the background. This dynamic mirrors the classical logical fallacy of equivocation within the same reasoning chain, much like the claim that “all banks have money” and “every river has two banks,” therefore “all rivers have money” (Ferguson, 1990). Similarly, in contemporary climate governance, the meaning of “finance” can quietly shift from public obligation grounded in historical responsibility to investment mobilisation and economic opportunity, thereby rendering market-compatible interventions as the only actionable response.

At the same time, deeper structural conditions that shape Africa’s underdevelopment and constrain its agency, including debt burdens, aid dependence, unfair terms of trade, extractivist investment agreements and shrinking fiscal and policy space, recede from view. These conditions are repositioned as contextual constraints, mentioned in passing rather than treated as central objects of intervention. The practical effect is a reductionist reframing in which Africa’s climate challenge is increasingly condensed into a question of attracting finance and demonstrating economic opportunity. This narrowing is also visible in contemporary negotiation discourse: as one African negotiator emphasised in informal discussions, the focus should not be on “blaming others” or expecting grants, but on “making an economic case” for climate action and transformation (Author’s field notes, February 2026). The result is an optimistic, cooperation-oriented presentation of Africa’s climate challenge that is actionable yet systematically privileges certain solution pathways over, for example, eradicating energy poverty, ensuring food sovereignty, freeing up fiscal space, improving access to early warning systems and strengthening adaptive capacity.

3.4 Financialisation as Depoliticisation

Within this rearranged governance landscape, financialisation becomes the dominant mode through which climate action is organised, not simply because it is discursively persuasive, but because it is institutionally and materially embedded in the architecture of global climate governance. Over the past decade, climate action has increasingly been routed through development banks and risk-sharing platforms whose operational mandates prioritise private investments. As a result, climate priorities are filtered through financial criteria such as bankability, risk profiles, creditworthiness and pipeline readiness long before they enter political negotiation. In this context, instruments such as blended finance, carbon markets and transition-oriented infrastructure investment, not only reflect a preference for markets, but also actively structure interventions.

Narratives that align with these institutional and economic constraints are amplified, while demands that fall outside financial logics, such as climate debt, reparations or climate debt cancellation, are more readily displaced as “overflows” outside the actionable frame. This pattern is visible in summit documents where redistributive claims appear in preambular justice language, while operational sections prioritise mobilisation instruments. This echoes Bracking’s (2015) analysis of the Green Climate Fund’s design process, where questions of responsibility and redistribution are repeatedly rendered technical through business models, performance metrics, expert authority and procedural governance, further entrenching neoliberal governance.

Under this logic, justice-oriented claims are reinterpreted through the lens of financial feasibility. Reparations are reframed as funding gaps to be addressed through mobilising finance, rather than as redistributive obligations grounded in historical responsibility. Historical responsibility itself is displaced toward forward-looking notions of solidarity and burden-sharing, as captured in the statement by Kenya’s president in 2025: “Yes, we remember the past. But we are not prisoners of it. We are architects and builders of the future.” [14]

Adaptation needs are increasingly discussed in terms of returns, bankability and “investable resilience” projects, rather than as development imperatives requiring sustained public provision, thereby reconstituting earlier extractive logics in financialised form, where finance mediates claims that were previously framed as matters of redistribution or public responsibility. Authority over what counts as credible climate action thus shifts toward actors with expertise in finance and markets, while claims that cannot be readily rendered bankable risk being marginalised as unrealistic or excessive.

3.5 Anti-Politics without Denial

It is important to note that this anti-political dynamic does not operate through silencing or coercion of dissenting voices. It gains prominence because it appears empowering. Claims such as “we are no longer victims” or “we are no longer prisoners of the past” resonate strongly with long-standing demands to move beyond narratives of dependency and foreshadow the framing of Africa as a solutions provider. Africa Climate Summit narratives therefore offer a language of agency that is politically appealing, even as this financialised framing narrows the space of contestation over how climate justice should be pursued. This also raises a deeper question about whether liberation is imagined through success within global markets themselves, positioning African states not as challengers of capitalist structures but as potential competitors within them and thereby recasting market participation as a pathway to autonomy.

The effect, therefore, is a reorganisation of reality through the displacement of politics. Contentious negotiations over historical responsibility and obligations under the Climate Convention and the Paris Agreement are recast as debates over pragmatism and the inevitability of compromise. Contestation is thus confined to parameters that leave the underlying political economy largely intact.

 4. The Pillars of the “Solutions Provider” Narrative

Understanding the “climate solutions leader” narrative as an anti-politics move clarifies why its internal tensions matter. This section therefore unpacks the core pillars through which this framing is operationalised, showing how renewable energy, nature-based solutions, critical minerals, labour and investment are assembled into a coherent solutions portfolio. In doing so, it demonstrates how the financialised logic identified in the previous sections shapes not only discourse, but also concrete policy priorities and negotiating positions.

4.1 Renewables and the Mirage of Green Growth

The Addis Ababa (2025) Declaration “reaffirm[s] that Africa’s exceptional potential in renewable energy makes the continent not only a key actor but a global leader in the just energy transition”.

In both the Nairobi and Addis declarations, Africa’s renewable potential is repeatedly positioned as a development pathway, a global mitigation contribution, a basis for green industrialisation and a rationale for investment mobilisation. Crucially, however, the leadership framing in both declarations is anchored not in demonstrated emissions reductions or technological dominance, but in Africa’s resource endowment and prospective clean energy capacity. In this sense, leadership is articulated as conditional and sector-specific, grounded in potential renewable supply rather than realised transition outcomes.

However, even the transition claim is contested at the aggregate level. As Hickel (2020) argues, renewables growth has largely been additive rather than substitutive. Empirically, while recent global energy data show rapid growth in clean energy investments [15], the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review (2025) reports record consumption across all major energy sources in 2024, including fossil fuels, indicating that renewables expansion has not offset rising overall demand. This pattern supports Hickel’s argument that renewable growth is occurring alongside, rather than replacing, continued fossil fuel use.

Read through an anti-politics lens, this matters because it allows “transition leadership” to function as a solution-frame even when the underlying energy system remains fossil-dependent, both in advanced economies and in emerging ones. For African states, the risk is not renewable energy investment per se, but incorporation into a global transition narrative that rewards bankable mitigation supply while leaving questions of historical responsibility, fiscal capture and adaptation finance structurally unaddressed. In this framing, success is measured through mobilised capital and installed capacity, rather than through a substantive assessment of whether renewables are displacing fossil fuels or transforming the underlying political economy of energy. This emphasis also leaves unresolved the distributional question of who ultimately bears the costs of climate damage.

The gap between renewables expansion and fossil fuel displacement becomes empirically visible in the Just Energy Transition Partnerships (JETPs), which currently function as the principal institutional mechanism through which the renewables-led transition is being operationalised in the Global South. Comparative analysis of the South Africa, Indonesia, Viet Nam Non-Aligned Movement
NAM The Non-Aligned Movement is a group of countries who, beginning in the 1950s, promoted a policy of neutrality towards the blocs led by the two superpowers – the USA and the Soviet Union –, who were by then fully engaged in the Cold War. In April 1955, a conference of Asian and African countries was held in Bandoeng (Indonesia) to promote unity and independence for the Third World, decolonization and an end to racial segregation. The initiators were Tito (Yugoslavia), Nasser (Egypt), Nehru (India) and Sukarno (Indonesia). The actual birth of the Non-Aligned Movement occurred in Belgrade in 1961. Other conferences would follow in Cairo (1964), Lusaka (1970), Algiers (1973) and Colombo (1976).
The work of the Non-Aligned Movement, which includes 120 countries, has had limited impact in recent years. and Senegal partnerships shows that despite public finance pledges amounting to approximately $30.8 billion, only 3–4% of this financing is provided as grants, with the remainder structured as concessional loans, commercial lending and risk-sharing instruments (Karg, Gupta & Chen, 2025). This composition matters because loan-dominant transition finance introduces debt obligations that prioritise fiscal repayment, favouring investments capable of generating revenue streams, while coal phase-out, worker compensation and community-level transition measures remain weakly resourced. In addition to these financing constraints, South Africa’s JETP has been criticised for falling short of transition costs, repackaging previously allocated funds rather than mobilising new and additional money and attaching donor conditionalities that can limit localisation provisions associated with distributional justice (Newell, Price & Daley, 2023). The partnership has also faced procedural critiques, including limited formal mechanisms to engage labour and civil society and consultation dynamics perceived as skewed toward business actors, reinforcing concerns that “just transition” is narrowed to de-risking private finance rather than confronting deeper economic injustice (Newell, Price & Daley, 2023). In Karg, Gupta & Chen’s (2025) comparative analysis, across all four cases, renewables deployment therefore proceeds alongside continued fossil fuel dependence, including ongoing coal use and expanded gas infrastructure framed as transitional, rather than through binding commitments to halt fossil expansion. In this sense, the JETPs confirm the additive pattern identified by Hickel (2020) at the global level.

Therefore, “just transition” operates less as a mechanism for structural energy transformation than as a governance frame that displaces political debate over fossil fuel phase-out and responsibility into technical disputes about project bankability and financing instruments, thereby enabling fossil-dependent systems and their localised pollution impacts to remain largely intact.

4.2 Nature-Based Solutions and the Financialisation of Land

A second element in the solutions narrative is the elevation of forests, particularly the Congo Basin, and related land- and ecosystem-based carbon sinks as a central contribution to global mitigation. Although this pillar is often framed as simply ecological, it is also political-economic because it depends on translating the atmosphere and biosphere into measurable units that can be commodified, priced, traded and governed through market instruments. Bond (2008) poses this danger directly, asking whether we are witnessing “the air itself”, one of the last commons, becoming commodified through market-environmentalist approaches.

When forests and other ecological systems are positioned primarily as carbon sinks within offsetting and market-based mitigation architectures, climate action is organised around compensation rather than obligation and around substitution rather than the phasing out of fossil fuels in the Global North. Offset mechanisms take either a personalistic form of compensation (individualised moral accounting, “I offset my flight”) or a financialised form (carbon as a tradable asset Asset Something belonging to an individual or a business that has value or the power to earn money (FT). The opposite of assets are liabilities, that is the part of the balance sheet reflecting a company’s resources (the capital contributed by the partners, provisions for contingencies and charges, as well as the outstanding debts). governed by price signals and speculation), reframing mitigation as offsetting elsewhere rather than binding reductions at source and shifting attention toward market design and pricing dynamics rather than structural fossil fuel phase-out. In practice, the offset strategy manages continued fossil fuel dependence by exporting mitigation rather than confronting emissions at source. Market-based mitigation hinges on carbon price signals that are inherently volatile and sensitive to policy and trading dynamics; in the EU Emissions Trading System, prices near €100 per tonne in 2023 fell to roughly €50 in early 2024, exposing the fragility of carbon pricing as a reliable mechanism for driving emissions reductions. As Bond (2008) cautions, such arrangements risk stabilising the very institutional and economic dynamics that produced the climate crisis, even as they appear to advance climate action. Read through a Fergusonian anti-politics lens, the issue is that the growing centrality of these approaches in mitigation strategies displaces questions of responsibility and binding emissions reductions, recasting them as technical matters of valuation, verification and trade.

Read through the anti-politics lens, this is exactly how nature-based solutions become politically consequential in the “solutions leader” framing. Questions that should be contested as distributive and historical, who pays, who cuts, who owes and whose land and livelihoods are reorganised, are remade as issues of measurement, verification, standards and market design. In that shift, Africa’s ecological landscapes are positioned less as sovereign socio-ecological systems and more as globally serviceable mitigation infrastructure. That is the internal tension: Africa is rhetorically centred as a leader, while the practical pathway of leadership is channelled through the same market logics that Bond warns can commodify the commons and discipline justice claims into “credible” market-compatible forms (Bond, 2008).

If Article 6 trading and Internationally Transferred Mitigation Outcomes (ITMOs) consolidate into a scalable global carbon market, the incentive structure may not support green industrial upgrading in Africa, but rather the externalisation of decarbonisation costs onto African land, labour and ecological space. Under conditions of debt overhang and fiscal pressure, Africa can be positioned as a low-cost sink for pollution displacement and offset supply, making the glamorous language of green growth and “global hubs” rhetorically appealing but politically counter-intuitive. This contributes to normalising a shift away from public obligations in developed countries toward private finance, often without systematic assessment of the quality of the instruments used. Nairobi’s emphasis on “climate-positive investments” and investment attraction is mirrored in Addis’s emphasis on catalytic finance, private capital mobilisation and market expansion.

Empirical evidence consistently confirms that carbon markets and nature-based solutions generate limited and unreliable financial returns for local communities, while imposing significant governance and land-use constraints. A systematic review synthesising evidence from 52 studies finds that livelihood outcomes from carbon projects in low- and middle-income countries are highly uneven and strongly dependent on project type and governance arrangements, with forest-based and conservation-focused projects showing the weakest and most contested benefits (Agora Global & Institute of Development Studies, 2025). The review documents recurrent problems of delayed and uncertain carbon payments, elite capture, restrictions on land and resource access and heightened local conflict, while noting that carbon revenues are typically small and insufficient to compensate for opportunity costs borne by communities (ibid). These findings align with Africa-specific political-economy analyses which argue that integrity failures in the voluntary carbon market are structural rather than incidental, rooted in implausible additionality claims, speculative baselines and the displacement of emissions reductions in the Global North through offsetting practices in the Global South (Cooksey, 2024). Ground-level evidence from soil-carbon projects in northern Tanzania further illustrates how these dynamics materialise in practice: long-term carbon contracts override local land-use plans, free, prior and informed consent is procedurally formal yet substantively hollow and pastoral livelihoods are reorganised to satisfy externally defined carbon methodologies rather than local ecological logics (Maasai International Solidarity Alliance, 2025). Even market-insider assessments acknowledge that a large share Share A unit of ownership interest in a corporation or financial asset, representing one part of the total capital stock. Its owner (a shareholder) is entitled to receive an equal distribution of any profits distributed (a dividend) and to attend shareholder meetings. of existing credits fail to meet higher integrity thresholds, prompting successive rounds of technical reform aimed at restoring buyer confidence rather than addressing underlying questions of responsibility, obligation and land governance (MSCI ESG Research, 2025). Therefore, this empirical evidence undermines the investment and financial-mobilisation logic that underpins the promotion of nature-based solutions as a central climate pathway for Africa.

4.3 Critical Minerals and the Repackaging of the Primary Commodity Trap

A third pillar of the “Africa as climate solutions leader” narrative centres on critical minerals and green value chains. Africa is increasingly framed as indispensable to the global energy transition by virtue of its mineral endowments for batteries, grids and clean technologies, recasting extraction as contribution and export as leadership. This framing shifts attention away from climate responsibility and redistribution toward Africa’s role as a supplier of inputs to global decarbonisation.

However, the empirical basis of this claim is weak. While summit discourse increasingly presents Africa as a central supplier of “critical minerals” for the global energy transition, this framing rests on highly aggregated and misleading claims about Africa’s actual production capacity and market power. As Simons (2025) demonstrates, Africa’s share of global output for most so-called critical minerals remains marginal, with production concentrated in a small number of countries and limited fiscal or industrial spillovers. This pattern is consistent with longer-standing political-economy analyses of commodity dependence, which show that without enforceable value-addition and international pricing power, resource booms tend to reproduce primary commodity traps rather than enable structural transformation (Hickel, 2020; UNCTAD, 2025).

This logic is made explicit in contemporary critical minerals strategies advanced by major external powers. The European Commission’s RESourceEU Action Plan (2025) frames critical raw materials primarily in terms of defence readiness, economic security and the prevention of “risky dependencies,” with partnerships with resource-rich countries operationalised to secure diversified offtake for European industry and reduce reliance on rival suppliers, particularly China. A similar orientation is evident in the 2025 strategic partnership agreement between the United States and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which explicitly prioritises “stable, predictable, long-term access” for U.S. persons and aligned actors to Congolese critical minerals, even as it rhetorically invokes local value addition and industrialisation. At the same time, Chinese state-owned enterprises and policy banks continue to hold a substantial share of mining assets and financing in the DRC’s minerals sector. [16] Across these competing strategies, Africa appears less as a strategic actor shaping the terms of engagement than as a site through which external powers pursue supply security.

Where Africa does hold significant mineral reserves, under current and foreseeable political-economic conditions this has not and is unlikely to translate into meaningful value capture or sustained industrial upgrading. As Nkrumah (1965:75) observed, “Africa has failed to make much headway on the road to purposeful industrial development because her natural resources have not been employed for that end but have been used for the greater development of the Western world.” More than six decades later, extraction continues to operate through limited domestic processing and externally oriented production arrangements, reproducing long-standing patterns of unequal exchange. African mineral endowments thus function as sites of geopolitical contestation among powerful external actors, including China, the United States and the European Union, rather than as foundations for sovereign industrial strategies. In this configuration, Africa remains positioned as a terrain upon which competing hegemonic interests are played out.

Without a rupture in the terms of trade and downstream processing, integration into so-called “green value chains” risks reproducing the primary commodity trap in greener form. Moreover, even this promise of integration is uneven and geographically concentrated, benefiting only a small subset of African countries. For most, the narrative of green industrial inclusion remains a mirage rather than a pathway to structural transformation.

Moreover, as Hickel (2020) demonstrates, scaling mineral extraction to meet global transition demand under growth-oriented assumptions entails severe ecological and social costs, including intensified water depletion, land dispossession and biodiversity loss. As Bond (2008) cautioned in earlier debates on carbon markets, market-compatible climate strategies tend to stabilise existing power relations rather than disrupt them. In this sense, the critical minerals pillar exemplifies how Africa is positioned as a solution provider while control over purpose and distribution remains externalised.

4.4 Demographics as Asset: Labour and the Financialisation of Capacity

Alongside energy, nature and minerals, Africa’s population is increasingly mobilised within the “solutions leader” narrative as an economic asset in its own right. The African Leaders Nairobi Declaration (2023) explicitly integrates labour into the continent’s “solutions leader” positioning. It emphasises that Africa “possesses both the potential and the ambition to be a vital component of the global solution to climate change”, grounding this claim in the continent’s “youngest and fastest-growing workforce”, alongside “massive untapped renewable energy potential” and “abundant natural assets”. In this framing, labour is positioned not primarily as a social constituency requiring protection, decent work, dignity, fair wages or redistribution, but as a scalable input into green industrialisation and clean manufacturing. Africa’s demographic profile thus becomes folded into the continent’s solutions portfolio, aligned with the requirements of global value chains and external decarbonisation strategies rather than grounded in domestic development priorities or social transformation.

This demographic framing mirrors the same financialised logic identified across other pillars. Employment generation is articulated less through structural transformation or public investment and more through the promise of private capital mobilisation, skills pipelines and “investment-ready” labour markets. Green jobs are thus imagined as downstream effects of bankable projects, rather than as outcomes of deliberate industrial policy or labour protection. As a result, questions of job quality, dignified treatment, wage levels and labour rights remain largely outside the dominant solutions discourse, even as Africa’s workforce is repeatedly invoked as central to climate leadership.

In this sense, labour completes the anti-politics move. A depoliticised framing masks the uneven distribution of costs and benefits associated with green transitions. Questions of who is absorbed into emerging labour markets, whose skills are rendered obsolete and under what conditions work is performed within export-oriented investment and extractive green supply chains are smoothed over by aggregate claims about job creation. By focusing on employment volumes rather than labour relations, skill hierarchies and distributive outcomes, the African climate summits’ narrative obscures who benefits from these transitions and whose labour is rendered expendable.

 5. Who Benefits from the “Solutions Leadership” Narrative? Power, Accumulation and Responsibility

Understanding the “Africa as climate solutions leader” narrative as an anti-politics framing clarifies its distributive consequences. By foregrounding opportunity and investability, the narrative reorganises climate action around the requirements of global capital mobilisation. Africa’s land, labour, minerals and forests are assembled into a supply-side response to a crisis whose drivers remain concentrated elsewhere. In doing so, responsibility for climate action is effectively reallocated away from historical emitters and towards those positioned as capable of delivering solutions.

This framing serves the interests of investors and advanced economies whose growth trajectories remain largely intact, as seen, for instance, in offset markets and minerals supply agreements. Climate leadership is recognised through bankable projects and the capacity to absorb private capital, while the terms on which Africa participates remain weakly articulated. As Amin (2022, p. 34) reminds us, the neoliberal project is fundamentally oriented towards reopening Southern markets in order to renew accumulation. Rather than altering Africa’s position in the global economy, the result is the continuity of extraction, now relabelled green, and Africa’s relegation to the bottom tier is reproduced.

Taken together, the solutions-leadership framing stabilises a model of climate action that appears forward-looking while, in practice, reproducing earlier structures of exploitation by leaving underlying political-economic relations largely intact. Africa is rendered visible as a contributor to global decarbonisation, yet only on terms compatible with investment-led accumulation and external growth priorities. By foregrounding Africa’s contribution to global decarbonisation, the narrative narrows the range of legitimate demands to those compatible with investment-led pathways, leaving little space for claims grounded in structural transformation or systemic overhaul. What ultimately emerges is a form of climate leadership that gains international recognition while remaining structurally constrained, setting up the very tensions and contradictions that become evident in practice.

 6. Re-anchoring Africa’s Climate Position: An Afrocentric Normative–Political Refusal

The preceding analysis does not suggest that the “Africa as climate solutions leader” framing operates without resistance. On the contrary, the contemporary climate landscape is marked by multiple contestations, including civil society mobilisation against summit outcomes, the resurgence of climate reparations and debt justice movements and strategic litigation targeting major historical and current emitters. These dynamics reflect ongoing efforts to re-politicise climate governance and to challenge the narrowing of justice claims into financialised and investment-led registers. However, this paper has focused deliberately on the institutionalisation of the solutions narrative within African Union-led processes and official climate communications, where it has acquired particular authority and policy traction, even amid such contestation.

A coherent African climate position requires a return to the foundational political claim embedded in the principle of Special Needs and Special Circumstances (SNSC), without apology or dilution. Africa’s SNSC reflects the continent’s material reality as both highly vulnerable to climate impacts and historically marginalised through slavery, colonial extraction, genocide, ecocide and unequal integration into the global economy. That this principle is recognised in the Convention and reiterated across successive COP processes underscores its legitimacy within the UNFCCC architecture. Yet, as shown throughout this paper, SNSC is increasingly overridden by a solutions-provider framing that shifts emphasis from obligation and redistribution to investability. An Afrocentric climate position must therefore insist that vulnerability, low emissions, limited adaptive capacity and historical underdevelopment are not weaknesses to be compensated through market participation, but political facts that justify differentiated treatment, unconditional public finance, technology transfer and policy space. Africa’s demand is not for symbolic leadership, but for justice grounded in historical responsibility and for a climate regime oriented toward decolonising the future by ensuring that transition pathways do not reproduce historical inequalities under market-led forms of climate action.

This insistence points toward a deeper strategic conclusion long articulated by Samir Amin: where the rules of the global system are structured to reproduce accumulation in the historical centres, meaningful development in the Global South cannot be achieved through adaptation to those rules, but requires rupture with them. Amin’s call for delinking does not imply autarky, but the reassertion of sovereign control over production structures, pricing and value capture, such that engagement with the world economy is subordinated to domestic and regional priorities rather than external accumulation (Amin, 2011, pp. 228, 332).

Translated to the climate domain, this perspective does not imply withdrawal from the UNFCCC, but a refusal of investment-led transition pathways that reproduce Africa’s role as a supplier of land, labour, carbon sinks and minerals to sustain growth elsewhere. Under conditions where the three means of implementation—finance, technology transfer and capacity—remain structurally blocked and justice-oriented claims continue to be filtered through market-compatible logics, Amin’s framework directs attention toward climate strategies centred on public investment and selective engagement with global markets on African terms, for example, potentially through instruments such as carbon export taxes for the mitigation composition of critical minerals (Scope 3 emissions reductions elsewhere). Such a refusal is most likely to emerge in periods of systemic crisis, when established centres of authority and knowledge are unsettled, creating space for alternative political claims to acquire legitimacy. In this context, Africa’s insistence on the “polluter pays” principle, reparations for past injustices including ecological debt, and non-extractive forms of cooperation for climate and development function as an effort to re-politicise climate governance by re-centring history and redistribution within climate and development discourse. An Afrocentric climate trajectory, therefore, is not defined by how effectively Africa supplies “solutions” to the global transition under existing market logics, but by whether climate action is reorganised to support development that is meaningful to African societies beyond ecological survival alone, recognising that African-centred governance could itself contribute more substantively to the global transition than the current discourse, which largely positions the continent as a provider of inputs rather than of transformative pathways.

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