If you’ll permit me, I’ll say the question is not whether the south has bad policies or whether southern policies are worse than northern, but why this happens.
The problem with the environmental policies of the global north is that they are secondary to imperialism and the pursuit of profit. As the global south is subjugated by the north, any bad environmental policies in the south are due to northern, imperialist meddling. So places in the south could have just as bad environmental policies as in the north but where this happens, it is usually dictated by the north.
It’s similar with austerity and neoliberalism: countries in the global south sell off national assets and rights to national resources, as well as cutting worker protections, etc, as a condition of accepting loans from the IMF. Those loans are usually necessary – however wealthy the country really is (African states, especially, are super rich in natural resources) – because countries that refuse IMF loans are then excluded from international networks of finance, distribution, technology, oil production/refinement, etc.
This is partly why multipolarity is going to shake things up so much. If a country in the global south currently wants to develop an industry, it has to pump it’s own oil, send that oil somewhere else for refinement, buy back the same-but-refined oil, and only then it can feed that oil into its domestic industries. It just include the extra steps because oil must be bought in dollars (unipolar petrodollar), and the US requires that if you want dollars, you have to follow US rules (and the US does not want certain countries to be self sustainable, so they cannot be allowed to develop the capacity e.g. to refine (their own) oil).
When countries in the south can buy oil in Rupees or Yuan, for example, they will have more freedom to avoid the US dollar, which means they’ll have more freedom to avoid IMF loans (which are a way of getting dollars) and so avoid the conditions attached to those loans. This will create room to improve their environmental policies.
If you still want to make a comparison, if suggest that as China and Cuba are in the global south, they do enough to make the whole of the global south do slightly better than the global north.
If you’ll permit me, I’ll say the question is not whether the south has bad policies or whether southern policies are worse than northern, but why this happens.
The problem with the environmental policies of the global north is that they are secondary to imperialism and the pursuit of profit. As the global south is subjugated by the north, any bad environmental policies in the south are due to northern, imperialist meddling. So places in the south could have just as bad environmental policies as in the north but where this happens, it is usually dictated by the north.
It’s similar with austerity and neoliberalism: countries in the global south sell off national assets and rights to national resources, as well as cutting worker protections, etc, as a condition of accepting loans from the IMF. Those loans are usually necessary – however wealthy the country really is (African states, especially, are super rich in natural resources) – because countries that refuse IMF loans are then excluded from international networks of finance, distribution, technology, oil production/refinement, etc.
This is partly why multipolarity is going to shake things up so much. If a country in the global south currently wants to develop an industry, it has to pump it’s own oil, send that oil somewhere else for refinement, buy back the same-but-refined oil, and only then it can feed that oil into its domestic industries. It just include the extra steps because oil must be bought in dollars (unipolar petrodollar), and the US requires that if you want dollars, you have to follow US rules (and the US does not want certain countries to be self sustainable, so they cannot be allowed to develop the capacity e.g. to refine (their own) oil).
When countries in the south can buy oil in Rupees or Yuan, for example, they will have more freedom to avoid the US dollar, which means they’ll have more freedom to avoid IMF loans (which are a way of getting dollars) and so avoid the conditions attached to those loans. This will create room to improve their environmental policies.
If you still want to make a comparison, if suggest that as China and Cuba are in the global south, they do enough to make the whole of the global south do slightly better than the global north.
You might enjoy Jason Hickel’s work in this area: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802200005X. There’s more work on his website: https://www.jasonhickel.org/research. If you want to read something a little less academic of his, try: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/4/4/who-is-responsible-for-climate.
Great explanation. Just want to let you know that the aljazeera article doesn’t seem to work.
Strange. It’s linked on his website, fourth one down on the essays page: https://www.jasonhickel.org/essays.