Whenever devastating floods wipe out crops or prolonged droughts push millions deeper into hunger across sub-Saharan Africa, the world hears urgent calls for justice. Yet one powerful force rarely faces scrutiny: international trade agreements. Born from colonial-era logic, these deals continue to favour the Global North while locking the Global South into patterns of exploitation that make genuine climate action almost impossible.
The Postcolonial Lens
Postcolonial theory cuts through the green rhetoric. Thinkers like Aníbal Quijano described ‘coloniality’– the enduring power structures that survived formal independence. In today’s trade law, coloniality survives in rules that prioritise economic liberalisation over ecological integrity and human rights. Agreements written in the North still treat the environment as an afterthought and the Global South as a source of raw materials rather than equal partners in a safe and just world.
How Trade Rules Keep Old Inequalities Alive
Let’s start with fossil fuel subsidies. Richer countries in the Global North spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year to support coal, oil, and gas companies. These are essentially government handouts that make fossil fuels artificially cheaper. Reports from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development show that these massive subsidies distort global markets and slow down the shift to cleaner energy worldwide. Meanwhile, Global South countries — many of which rely heavily on exporting raw materials like oil, minerals, or crops — struggle to compete. The playing field is heavily tilted in favour of the rich nations, making it even harder for poorer countries to grow their economies in a fair way.
Intellectual Property Rules Block Clean Technology Sharing
Intellectual property rules in trade agreements make the problem even worse. Many modern trade deals include patent protections that go well beyond the global minimum standards agreed under the World Trade Organisation (WTO) – for instance by extending patent terms past the standard 20 years, restricting governments' ability to issue compulsory licences that allow a technology to be produced without the patent holder's consent, or limiting the reverse-engineering and adaptation that let local firms learn from and build on existing inventions. The original Trans-Pacific Partnership included provisions of this kind. Similar clauses have appeared in a string of bilateral trade agreements the United States has signed with countries across Latin America and Asia, and the European Union has faced criticism for pushing comparable demands in its trade negotiations with Mercosur countries. Even agreements that are never fully ratified can shape the landscape: The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement of the early 2010s, though it collapsed amid public opposition, signalled the kind of enforcement-heavy intellectual property regime that Northern negotiators continue to pursue elsewhere.
Patents on clean energy technologies, such as solar panels, batteries, and wind turbines, are mostly owned by companies in the Global North. As a result, these technologies often remain expensive imported products instead of tools that Global South countries can build, adapt, or produce locally.
This creates a double bind. As the India — Solar Cells case shows, when a country tries to build its own renewable manufacturing base through local-content requirements, that effort gets struck down as an illegal trade restriction. Yet the same trade architecture, through patent rules that go beyond the WTO baseline, also makes it harder to access or licence the underlying clean technology in the first place. The outcome is clear: poorer countries end up paying high licensing fees for, or going without, the very technologies they urgently need to fight climate change – while wealthy Northern countries retain both their technological advantage and the trade rules that protect it.
Green Protectionism or Real Climate Action? The European Union’s Carbon Border Tax
The European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) offers a striking modern example. Phased in fully from 2026, it taxes imports based on their carbon content to prevent ‘carbon leakage’. On paper it sounds like climate leadership. In practice, peer-reviewed studies show it disrupts trade flows from the Global South, hitting steel, cement and fertiliser exporters hardest. Countries in Africa and Asia face a ‘triple burden’: compliance costs, limited institutional capacity, and the risk of trade retaliation. As these studies show, CBAM functions as green protectionism that protects industries in some countries while punishing those least responsible for historical emissions.
A Promising African Alternative Facing Global Headwinds
Compare this with the African Continental Free Trade Area. Its sustainability clauses are genuinely promising – they demand environmental and labour standards, promote green industrialisation, and emphasise inclusive development for women and small enterprises. Yet the African Continental Free Trade Area operates inside a global system still rigged against it. African nations must navigate WTO rules written decades ago by former colonial powers while facing unilateral measures like CBAM that treat their exports as threats rather than opportunities.
Trade Rules Still Prioritise Growth Over the Planet
Even the WTO's dispute settlement system shows the same pattern. In the case India — Certain Measures Relating to Solar Cells and Solar Modules, the United States successfully challenged India's domestic content requirements under its National Solar Mission – rules requiring solar power developers to use solar cells and modules manufactured in India in order to sell electricity to the government under the scheme. The WTO ruled against India, finding the requirements breached trade rules even though they were designed to build a domestic renewable energy industry. For Global South governments, such measures are less about protectionism than about building the manufacturing base that today's industrialised nations relied on during their own development – and the kind of capacity that would let countries produce, rather than import, the clean technologies discussed earlier. Yet under WTO national treatment and subsidy rules written decades before climate change entered the trade agenda, India's attempt to grow its own solar industry was struck down, while the fossil fuel subsidies discussed earlier face no comparable challenge. Trade liberalisation came first; ecological urgency second. The message remains clear: economic growth, on terms set by the Global North, still trumps planetary boundaries.
Why This Matters for Climate Justice
These structures do more than shift environmental footprints. Recent research shows regional trade agreements accelerate the outsourcing of energy, raw materials and land use from poorer to richer nations. Wealthy countries reduce their own footprints while the Global South bears the real costs – lost biodiversity, polluted rivers, and communities displaced by extractive projects.
Indigenous, feminist and decolonial scholars have long warned that siloed thinking ignores lived realities. Women in rural areas carry the heaviest burden when droughts destroy harvests or floods destroy homes. Yet trade rules rarely consider these human dimensions. Quantitative data from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development confirms the pattern: many developing countries remain locked in trade dependencies that leave them with little fiscal space for climate resilience.
The result is a world where the Global North enjoys greater climate insulation, for now, and cheap goods, while the Global South pays in lost lives, lost livelihoods, and lost futures. This is not accidental. It is the continuation of colonial extraction patterns, dressed up in the language of sustainability.
Time for Decolonising Reforms
Change is possible. Trade agreements can be redesigned. Mandatory sustainability impact assessments before any new deal is signed would examine effects on climate, biodiversity, and human rights – not just Gross Domestic Product growth. Reparative justice mechanisms could acknowledge historical debts by channelling technology transfer and climate finance without the usual strings attached.
We also need to bring diverse voices to the table. Indigenous knowledge systems offer centuries of experience in living within planetary boundaries, as the. work by the Local Contexts initiative on Indigenous data sovereignty shows. Feminist perspectives , including feminist political ecology scholarship, remind us that sustainability is about care as much as emissions. When these voices shape the rules instead of reacting to them, trade law can finally serve people and the planet.
The African Continental Free Trade Area shows one path forward. Its emphasis on regional green industrialisation and investor obligations could become a model if the global system stops tilting the scales. The challenge is to expand such approaches beyond Africa and make them the norm, not the exception.
What You Can Take Away
Sustainability law is not just about writing new regulations. It is about confronting the old rules that continue to favour the few at the expense of the many and the living planet itself. Until we honestly acknowledge the colonial legacies deeply baked into international trade law, genuine climate justice will remain out of reach.
The next generation of trade agreements must put people and the planet first and profits second.
The choice before us is stark: keep repeating the injustices of history to the detriment of the Global South, the stability of the climate, and the future of all generations, or finally break this pattern.
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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
