Green Colonialism: When Sustainability Sustains Inequality

Toxic dust coats the air in gray fumes as miners work tirelessly day after day. This is the scene of modern-day green energy mineral mining, an industry that has been expanding recently as demand for renewable energy skyrockets in response to climate change. However, the majority of manufacturers in this industry are wealthy private corporations, and the methods of this extraction perpetuate a new type of colonialism.

“Green colonialism” is the term coined to describe a modern type of neocolonialism in which the Global North continues historical patterns of dominance, exploitation, and exclusion of less developed economies in pursuit of renewable energy development. This neocolonialism is often targeted towards developing countries, which are classified as having a lower-than-average Human Development Index Score, poor infrastructure, or less developed industrialization. Additionally, this colonialism comes in the form of the export-based economies that push developing countries onto the least profitable rungs of the global market for green energy resources and prevent them from developing sustainable infrastructure. 

Green energy minerals such as lithium, cobalt, copper, and nickel are crucial for the development of technologies used in the making of renewable energy sources such as electric vehicles, wind turbines, and solar panels. As global temperatures have been rising, the market to find renewable energy sources has expanded, and with that, the demand for necessary green energy minerals has increased. 70 percent of such minerals are located in the Global South, yet despite this possession of crucial minerals, developing countries in this region are continuously excluded from the profits of their own lands, retaining a low percentage of the total market value generated from their respective resources.

This pattern is seen throughout many developing countries in the Global South, but has been greatly amplified in countries containing large percentages of the world’s total reserves of specific minerals, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

The DRC currently produces over 75 percent of the global supply of cobalt, and in 2024, this cobalt generated a total of $4 billion. Despite those massive profits, the DRC only retained 14 percent of the money generated from the cobalt. 

The DRC’s economy also highly depends on the profits gained from exporting raw cobalt and copper, another highly abundant resource in the DRC. In fact, 56 percent of total DRC exports are copper and 21 percent are cobalt. Because of the portion of profit this market generates for the DRC, mining continues to be a large industry for the country. 

However, despite the continuous heavy mineral mining that the DRC funds in an effort to remain in what should be an incredibly profitable green energy market industry, the DRC faces crippling underdevelopment and some of the worst Human Development Index scores in health and education. In fact, the DRC had one of the worst GDPs per capita in 2024 of $721. Despite the extensive role the DRC plays in the global economy of green minerals, it isn’t retaining the majority of its profits. As a result, the nation is unable to invest in the public health and education sectors that it lacks. As mining continues in order to generate profits from exports, the focus of the country shifts away from developing its own industries and towards selling to external, exploitative ones.

External organizations, frequently ones with wealthy corporate interests, are the direct proponents of below-average Human Development Index scores in such resource-rich countries. Private enterprises, interested in gaining profits from the expanding green energy market, utilize economic leverage to place pressure on developing countries to continue mining. These countries are particularly vulnerable to this economic pressure because many of them have a history of being colonies, where dependence on foreign governmental structures reduced the ability to develop strong self-governance and institutionalization. The political issues these nations first had to deal with detrimentally impacted their development of infrastructure and the existence of alternative jobs beyond resource extraction in the long run.

Today, though, previously mentioned pressures to continue resource extraction perpetuate a cycle of low domestic infrastructural development and lead to further dependency on extraction, and therefore, less infrastructural development. This creates a continuous dependency on exports and prevents developing countries from building the infrastructure necessary to increase public sectors such as education, safety, health, and social services.

The lack of focus on domestic infrastructure has also hindered the necessary progress that needs to be made in the expansion of green energy in developing countries. Though green energy is supposedly the path towards a more sustainable and equitable future, developing countries receive little actual funding to further their own green infrastructure. The human rights advocacy group Oxfam reported in 2024 that sub-Saharan Africa, which contains over 85 percent of the population of the world who lack access to electricity, received merely two percent of total investments spent that year on renewable energy. This has prevented regions with unstable access to electricity from gaining independence in energy systems, often leading to their reliance on fuel generated in other countries. This dependence is detrimental because it prevents these countries from being self-sustaining in long-term energy production, requiring extra expenditures without supporting the construction of infrastructure that would further development. Additionally, reliance on fuel, with little investment into the developing countries making up a large area of the Earth prevents the full expansion of renewable energy throughout the world. This is exactly why green energy resource colonialism is one of the most detrimental forms of neocolonialism, not only because it is exploitative, but also because it restricts access to a market that needs to be globally accessible to mitigate climate change effectively.

However, several countries have begun taking approaches to gain access to the green energy market beyond just exportation, leading to the construction of domestic infrastructure. For example, Chile has nationalized the lithium industry with the establishment of the National Lithium Company, which allows the nation to extract, refine, manufacture, and recycle lithium domestically. This ensures that what Chile can supply to outside markets is not just cheap raw minerals, but already manufactured and refined products. By doing this, Chile has not only been able to expand its own domestic refining, manufacturing, and recycling capabilities, inadvertently strengthening its infrastructure and increasing job opportunities, but has also gained profits that can be reinvested in the nation’s further economic and infrastructural development. This is beneficial to the country as it allows for further job creation and less dependency on foreign private entities to sell unrefined minerals and buy back manufactured goods, keeping the market within the domestic industries.

The international community needs to continue advocating for developing countries to gain greater control of their full production chain of green energy. One of the ways that this can be done is through investment into domestic refining and manufacturing industries in resource rich nations. Under this model, developing countries can sell more than just raw materials, providing high-quality manufactured goods instead of having to buy them further down the line. If the international community is able to provide developing countries with the help they need to access this market, the cycle of dependency on raw material exports and foreign, refined imports, leading to decreased infrastructure, can be prevented before it even begins. This solution doesn’t require all countries to participate, just a commitment from major, united fronts, especially those in supranational organizations like the African Union and various other South-South alliances.

Through international efforts to enact legislation and financial support that push for increased domestic control of industries, developing countries that rely on unrefined materials for most of their profits can find greater infrastructural development. Yield generated from domestic as opposed to private control can directly shift the markets of resource-rich nations from just mining to a higher level of technological development and manufacturing that occurs further along the production chain, particularly when making renewable technologies. This not only builds a long-term and sustainable form of profit but also increases the opportunity for involvement in more advanced technology industries. As we move towards a greener future, we must strive towards a simple goal—a goal of tomorrow’s green energy market not replicating the exploitative patterns of the past but instead moving toward diversifying market access and a more sovereign and sustainable future for all.