Contemporary Contradictions of the Global Development Project: geopolitics, global ecology and the ‘development climate’

Abstract

The global development project faces newly evident challenges in the combination of energy, climate and food crises. Their interrelationships create a powerful moment in world history in which analysts and practitioners grope for solutions, limited by the narrow market episteme. This contribution argues that official development, in advocating green market solutions, recycles the problem as solution—a problem rooted in the geopolitics of an unsustainable global ‘metabolic rift’ and a discourse of global ecology reinforcing international power relations through monetary valuation, and deepening the North's ‘ecological debt’.