Climate Breakdown in Pakistan: (Post) Colonial Capitalism on the Global Periphery

Abstract

Amongst the most devastating extreme weather events in recent years, the 2022 Pakistan floods ostensibly triggered a new-found urgency to reduce emissions and redress other underlying causes of human-induced global warming. Yet multinational corporations and Western governments remain non-committal about shifting away from non-renewable energy, offering meaningful climate and debt financing, or substantively reducing emissions. Meanwhile, the modalities of capital accumulation in postcolonial contexts such as Pakistan are destroying already vulnerable ecosystems, even as they reinforce logics of expropriation and uneven development inherited from colonial times. As Pakistan experiences a demographic explosion and mainstream politics becomes increasingly reactionary, the imperative of posing an alternative hegemonic conception to the dominant development paradigm is ever more acute. This Commentary interrogates the meaning of climate justice so as to bring the global political economy into conversation with the demographic, environmental, and economic trends in the post-colony, with a specific focus on the 2022 floods in Pakistan. It is contended that the Pakistan case can be broadly extrapolated to postcolonial South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, regions that are home to the fastest growing young populations in the world, and also amongst the most vulnerable to climate change.

Key Words:

• climate justice
• expropriation
• floods
• post-colonial state
• uneven development

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The British colonialists alone pillaged an estimated US$45 trillion from the Indian subcontinent (see Patnaik 2017).

2 The list of promises made by historical emitters that have never materialised is long and growing. In 2009, for example, the OECD pledged that it would raise $100 billion to support the most vulnerable and financially strapped countries, only a fraction of which was ever disbursed. In 2014 the US government promised the relatively paltry sum of $3 billion to the UN Green Climate Fund, eventually delivering a pittance (Dawn Prism, December 2, 2022).

3 The growing controversies about big dams led to the formation of the World Commission on Dams (WCD) in 1998, a body which conducted wide-ranging consultations with multiple stakeholders around the world. The WCD released its final report in 2002, a damning indictment against big dams and mega water infrastructures. It proposed smaller interventions on rivers and other water bodies so as to prevent human displacement and ecological despoilation to the greatest possible extent (see Goodland 2010).