When the European Union announced its ambitious European Green Deal in 2019, positioning itself as the global leader in climate action, it promised a just transition that would “leave no one behind.” However, scratch beneath the surface of this green rhetoric, and a troubling pattern emerges: the same regulatory frameworks designed to address the climate crisis continue to reproduce colonial patterns of resource extraction, knowledge hierarchies, and burden-shifting to the Global South.
This is not merely a technical problem of policy design. It is a fundamental question of power: whose voices shape sustainability governance, whose knowledge counts as legitimate, and whose futures are prioritised when European environmental law charts the path forward. As European policymakers craft ever more sophisticated climate regulations, they risk building a gleaming green future for some while maintaining—and even deepening—environmental injustice for others.
The Colonial DNA of Environmental Governance
European environmental law did not emerge in a vacuum. Its foundational concepts (territorial sovereignty, property rights in nature, technocratic expertise) carry forward worldviews forged during centuries of colonial expansion. When EU regulations define “sustainable” resource use or establish carbon markets, they often privilege Northern scientific frameworks while marginalising Indigenous knowledge systems and postcolonial perspectives that offer alternative pathways to sustainability.
Consider the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), heralded as a tool to prevent carbon leakage and level the playing field for European industries. On paper, it appears neutral—simply pricing carbon embedded in imports. In practice, it functions as a regulatory barrier that penalises developing economies for using the same fossil-fuel-intensive development pathways that Europe itself followed for two centuries. The policy externalises the costs of Europe’s green transition to countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, which now face new trade barriers precisely when they need economic growth to lift populations out of poverty. This is what scholars, such as Farhana Sultana, call “climate coloniality”—the perpetuation of colonial power relations through contemporary climate governance.
Whose Knowledge, Whose Solutions?
The power problem in European sustainability law extends beyond material redistribution to epistemic justice—the question of whose knowledge systems are recognised as valid. EU environmental legislation overwhelmingly privileges technocratic expertise: environmental impact assessments, cost-benefit analyses, and scientific risk evaluation. These tools have value, but they also systematically exclude other ways of understanding human-nature relationships.
Indigenous communities from the Arctic to the Amazon have developed sophisticated approaches to legal pluralism for environmental stewardship over millennia. However, when European regulations extend their extraterritorial reach—through, for example, supply chain due diligence requirements—they rarely create space for these alternative knowledge systems. Instead, they impose Northern compliance frameworks that indigenous and local communities must navigate, often at significantly high cost. The irony is stark: European environmental law claims to pursue transformative sustainability while reproducing the very knowledge hierarchies that contributed to the ecological crisis in the first place.
The Just Transition Mirage
Perhaps nowhere is the power asymmetry more visible than in the politics of “just transitions.” The concept has become ubiquitous in EU climate policy, appearing in everything from the European Green Deal to corporate sustainability due diligence directives. However, justice rhetoric does not automatically produce just outcomes.
Competing visions of justice (distributive, procedural, recognitional, and restorative) are contested through legal processes dominated by actors with vastly different levels of power. Corporate lobbies shape regulatory frameworks; Global North NGOs set international agendas; marginalised communities affected by both climate change and climate policies struggle to make their voices heard in Brussels boardrooms.
When the EU mandates that companies conduct environmental due diligence in their supply chains, it creates new compliance costs that fall disproportionately on small producers in developing countries. When European renewable energy targets drive demand for critical minerals, the environmental and social costs of extraction are borne by communities in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chile, and Indonesia—far from the view of European decision-makers.
These are not accidental side effects. They are structural features of environmental governance that prioritise European economic interests while claiming universal sustainability leadership.
Pathways to Decolonised Environmental Law
Acknowledging these power dynamics is not a counsel of despair—it is the first step toward genuine transformation. European environmental law can become a tool for justice rather than its obstacle, but only through deliberate institutional reform.
This requires redistributing decision-making power to affected communities through multi-scalar governance mechanisms that give meaningful authority to those who bear environmental burdens. It means establishing accountability mechanisms that address historical ecological debt, recognising that Europe’s current wealth was built partly on the environmental exploitation of colonised territories. It demands integrating legal pluralism into European frameworks, creating space for Indigenous and postcolonial legal traditions rather than imposing one-size-fits-all Northern models.
Most fundamentally, it requires epistemic humility: recognising that European legal frameworks do not have a monopoly on sustainability solutions.
A necessary redistribution of powers
European environmental law stands at a crossroads. It can keep refining technical regulations while leaving colonial continuities and power asymmetries untouched , risking the perpetuation of the very injustices it claims to resolve , or it can confront them directly. Confrontation entails redistributing decision-making power to affected communities, embedding legal pluralism and Indigenous knowledge into European frameworks, and building accountability for historical ecological debt. The scholarship and lived experience of the Global South offer insights European policymakers have too often ignored. Genuine transformation will not come from better technology or carbon pricing alone; it requires European institutions willing to share power with the communities and regions historically excluded from decision-making , not just rhetoric. The real question is not whether change is possible, but whether Europe has the political will to pursue justice even when it means giving up some of its own power.
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This blog post is based on the paper to be presented at the conference Sustainability Law: Law’s Response to the Convergence of Crises, 16-18 September 2026, at the University of Oslo
