Colonialism

Colonialism refers to systems of control, occupation, and exploitation of foreign peoples and lands, while coloniality and neo‑colonialism describe how these power structures persist even without formal occupation, through political, economic, and cultural arrangements that maintain dependence and enable resource extraction. Both forms are defined by domination and appropriation, shape unequal global hierarchies such as the Global North/South, intersect with race, gender, and ecology, and can only be dismantled by understanding how these structures continue to operate and reproduce themselves today.

Colonialism is an ongoing system that created and continues to reproduce the global inequalities at the heart of the climate crisis. Colonial expansion built the foundations of industrialisation, how contemporary governance and corporate power mirror earlier extractive hierarchies, and how climate impacts fall along colonial geographies. Narratives like the Anthropocene obscure responsibility by universalising what was driven by colonial states and capitalist empires.

Colonialism and imperialism, though historically intertwined, are distinct ideologies. Imperialism centres on external domination and rule from afar, while colonialism is a “productive,” internal project aimed at reshaping people, land, and social life through labour, education, and settlement. The two concepts were only conflated after WWII, when the UN narrowed “colonialism” to overseas rule, obscuring settler and domestic forms and marginalising Indigenous experiences, thus making it essential to recover the distinction today.

Modern Western science emerged alongside European colonialism and was deeply shaped by it, from the extraction of wealth and biological specimens to the dominance of English and the over‑representation of scientists from former colonising nations. These colonial legacies persist today through practices like parachute science, but there is growing recognition of the need to decolonise research through specimen repatriation, equitable partnerships, locally led science in formerly colonised countries, and greater respect for Indigenous knowledge systems.

Climate change is inseparable from ongoing settler colonialism, because the same structures that historically dispossessed Indigenous peoples now drive environmental degradation, displacement, and cultural erasure. Climate impacts intensify colonial violence by undermining land relations, food systems, and cultural continuity, producing conditions that meet international definitions of genocide. Indigenous communities are innovating and adapting, but true climate justice requires non‑Indigenous governments and industries to confront their colonial complicity and share responsibility rather than relying on Indigenous resilience alone.

The countries most responsible for historical emissions are least affected by climate impacts, creating a “climate debt” that justice movements argue must be repaid through reparations, debt cancellation, and a just transition. Today’s climate responses often reproduce colonial patterns (e.g. through land grabs for conservation, carbon offsets, or renewable energy), making it essential to confront ongoing green colonialism and hold powerful states and corporations accountable.

Green colonialism describes how Global North climate policies and “green” projects continue colonial patterns of extraction by exploiting Indigenous lands and resources, excluding Indigenous rights and knowledge, and imposing conservation, renewable energy, and carbon‑offset schemes without consent; decolonising climate action requires centring Indigenous leadership, ensuring equitable decision‑making, addressing historical responsibility, and guaranteeing climate justice for the Global South.

Climate aid from the Global North often reinforces the same colonial power structures that caused the climate crisis, imposing donor priorities, deepening dependency, and masking ongoing extraction. Climate justice instead requires climate reparations and South–South solidarity so that solutions are shaped by the communities most affected, not by the governments and corporations most responsible.

The global financial architecture, built through colonialism and maintained by institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, continues to extract wealth from the Global South, lock countries into structural deficits and debt cycles, and enforce development models that undermine food and energy sovereignty. Achieving climate and economic justice requires rejecting these structural traps, asserting collective Southern control over strategic resources, and building alternative financial institutions capable of challenging Global North dominance.

Pacific climate justice is grounded in mauri and va, relational concepts that centre well‑being, reciprocity, and spiritual–ecological balance. Coloniality and capitalist Modernity degrade this balance through biopower, necropolitics, and one‑truth ideologies that marginalise Indigenous knowledge, constrain agency, distort migration, and impose narratives that justify harm, whereas Pacific practices like talanoa, lauga, malaga and vakavanua show how communities cultivate resilience, restore va, resist imposed control, and co‑create diverse, hopeful futures.