Within the stated purview of the United Nations (UN), International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank (WB), and related Multilateral Institutions (MLI) is the facilitation of sustainable development and economic growth, purportedly leading to reductions in global poverty and inequalities. These goals permeate supranational institutions of global governance; their centrality emphasised through agreements such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and propagated through instruments including Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAP).
This chapter argues, however, that these goals are inherently contradictory, bordering on nonsensical, and that the effect of IMF and WB policy towards the Third World is, contrary to stated aims, the perpetuation of vulnerability for some of the world’s most impoverished people, and the exacerbation of anthropogenic climate breakdown.
Third World Debt is inexorably entwined with the colonial encounter, and subsequent centuries of extraction and exploitation legitimised through globalisation. When the IMF and WB mandate SAP in exchange for loans proffered in order to service this debt, Third World states embark upon extensive trade liberalisation, and the privatisation of natural resources and land. The subsequent extractive activity of Transnational Corporations (TNC) and foreign states serves to propagate the cycle of exploitation and environmental depredation, whilst enabling wealthier states to both materially gain from the activity, and offset their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement (PA). This activity is not only sanctioned, but encouraged through a neoliberal policy platform that prioritises economic growth and Western conceptions of development and sustainability above all else.
Consequently, Third World peoples, rather than experiencing alleviation from the cycle of debt locked in since the colonial encounter, are rendered further impoverished, bereft, and dependent, severely impeding their ability to mitigate or adapt to the effects of climate breakdown.
