Joining the Dots: Sustainability Strategy Reflects the Colonial Logic of the Global Economy

Colonialism is about power. It's about someone in a far away land deciding what I should do, what's good for me, and how I should think. How do you see this playing out in the global textiles-apparel industry, where all so-called sustainability initiatives are driven by brands and retailers from the Global North?
Laurie Parsons: Colonialism is indeed all about power – and this point is central to the book. When it comes to climate change, knowledge is power, but the architecture of knowledge that underpins sustainability thinking fundamentally benefits the rich world to the detriment of the rest of it. In 2023 we depend on supply chains for almost everything that we do, use, wear or eat, but the logistics revolution of recent decades has shrouded all of this huge, complex landscape of production in darkness. The disintegration of supply chains, which greatly benefits lead firms as it allows for the diffusion of responsibility, means that it is rarely possible to meaningfully oversee the whole production. This is a very lucrative obscurity, facilitating green claims to be made with little chance of contradiction.

One of the ways of driving carbon colonialism has been the carbon offset practice. Over years, many had either called it a new way of colonising the South or simply described it as an outright scam. But, with the Verra carbon standard scandal, the carbon offset world is in turmoil. Verra's CEO is resigning and Gucci has decided to drop its 'carbon neutral' claim. Did you see this coming? How significant is this in making textile-fashion brands change the way they work, or make (true or false) claims, if at all?
Laurie Parsons: Carbon offsets have been in the news a lot of late, as well as being one of the main ways in which the term carbon colonialism has been used in the last 12 months or so. Clearly they are a major issue and very good example of the ways in which global Southern land is co-opted into global Northern sustainability strategies. I’m very pleased by the recent scepticism around them, but I don’t focus on them in great depth in the book, because I view them as just one part of a wider sustainability story. To elucidate this, I identify six ways in which the term carbon colonialism has been used in recent years, from carbon offsets to carbon capture and storage – and make the case that these are all symptoms of  a wider issue: that sustainability strategy reflects the colonial logic of the global economy and in particular the nationalist mindsets that underpin it.

The process that makes all this work is called trade. You have examined this closely through your Disaster Trade project. Which do you think is truer: that trade drives emissions, or trade actually helps the West hide the emissions? Or is this, something like the chicken or the egg debate?
Laurie Parsons: I don’t think that trade has to inherently drive emissions. You can trade fruit between towns on a bicycle, after all. What I do see, though, is that the current structure of global trade is set up fundamentally to extract resources from the earth, transport value to the global North and leave waste (and emissions – now they have become an issue) in the global South. This is simply a symptom of trade being conducted in circumstances of unequal power – and of systems of environmental accountability designed around that power.

What role has globalisation played in all this? In today's world, if you pull a string in Honduras, a building might come crashing down in Botswana. Chaos Theory in a colonial garb. So, what's the way out? On the one hand, all in the Global South would want to get industrialised, or at least affluent. But that would come with the emissions that the Global North wants us to make. From the 1992 Rio Summit to the COP27 in Egypt, it took the West 30 years to agree to something as fundamental as a loss and damage funding. Please help us understand this mess.
Laurie Parsons: Globalisation over the last half century has intensified and expanded what I call the global factory: the global system of production and trade that we depend on for everything in our lives, but the last fifty years did not emerge from nowhere. The separation of land labour and capital in the late 18th century allowed Britain to wrest control of the global cotton trade from India and contemporary production is still set up along these lines. As the impacts of climate change become clear, the rich world has two choices: rip up this system and tackle the global issue of climate breakdown, or keep the system as it is and accumulate the resources to mitigate those impacts when they occur. We are unequivocally on the latter path and the recent loss and damage frameworks – based as they are around profit driven lending in the main – do little to nothing to change that.

Amid all this, one instrument that has been central to many debates is that of the lifecycle analysis. Given your own exhaustive research in Hot Trends, do you think the LCA debates digress us away from the real issues? Does the use-per-garment make more LCA sense? Or is it just another way of creative bookkeeping?
Laurie Parsons: Lifecycle analysis is very important. If we are going to do anything to tackle the environmental impact of our economy then we absolutely have to think in this way. The problem, though, is that we are still relying on industry averages for these calculations, as we don’t have meaningful oversight over production processes as they progress around the world. The mounds of garment waste in the Atacama desert are one example of this – and Cambodia has its own garment mounds as I describe in the book – but the fundamental problem is that we can’t regulate what we cannot see. We have to regulate our international economy in the same way as our domestic one. Anything else is just lip service.