Geopolitics – the unruly agent

LT: Welcome to this episode of Currents in sustainability. I’m your host, Lauri Tammiste. 

In 2024, more than 70 nations, home to half of the world’s population, held national elections. Among others, we have seen a growing crisis of confidence in democracies: South Korea’s president is impeached, Germany faces in February snap elections and Canada’s leadership is in flux following Justin Trudeau’s resignation. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s second term promises to pose challenges to global trade and order. 

Global military spending hit a record high last year. While a ceasefire holds between Israel and Hamas, and Trump vows to end the war in Ukraine, the World Economic Forum still warns that state-based conflicts are the top global risk for 2025. 

Over the past decade, conflict and climate crises have displaced millions of people. Combined that with record-high temperatures and extreme weather events, we will have a devastation, creating a perfect storm of challenges. 

This episode, we will unpack all these seismic geopolitical shifts and their implications for the future.  

Today, we are joined by first, Leo Horn-Phathanothai, who is a Bangkok-based author, strategist and non-profit leader, working to accelerate green transitions in Southeast Asia. He is an Affiliate Researcher with the Stockholm Environment Institute in Asia and also working with the Chiangmai University and London University. He is also a founder of Just Transition Incubator. 

Also joining us is Philip Osano who is the Centre Director of SEI Africa. His interest is in environmental policy, development and international affairs. Philip has 15 years of experience in a range of issues including biodiversity and ecosystem governance, climate change adaptation, land use and integrated environmental planning. Philip has worked in numerous countries in Africa, but also in Canada and the United States.  

And finally, we have Katie Browne, who is a Research Fellow and Team Lead for the International Climate Risk and Adaptation Team at SEI Headquarters. Her research focuses on global governance, international climate finance and inequality. Thanks for joining us! 

I will start out by really inviting you to come in with reflections on geopolitics on a deeper level. Each of you are working on it from a different angle, but it would be nice if you could first say what does geopolitics, first and foremost, mean to you and how do you see it affecting your work today? Katie, maybe you? 

KB: Sure. Thank you. I think it’s fair to say that as researchers we could spend the whole podcast debating what geopolitics are but at a basic level, I would say that geopolitics is about power struggles and discrepancies between states so on an international level. I work on international climate finance, so we see geopolitics emerge quite a bit in this arena. 

I think that we’re seeing that as climate change becomes more prevalent and more severe, that there are tremendous disparities in the impacts across different countries and different regions of the world. There are tremendous differences in states’ capacities to adapt, which is a great deal of what I focus on, and these are shaped by deep-rooted inequities between states that go back to colonialism and are also shaped by the modern shifting power between states. 

So I think if we just take one example, we see that debt at a state level is reaching unsustainable levels for much of the lower and middle income world. Just to give like one statistic, the share of low-income countries, so these are the poorest countries in the world, that are at risk or already in debt distress has doubled from 30 to 60 percent just in the last decade. 

And so what that means is that those countries don’t have the space, basically, they just don’t have the money to invest in mitigating emissions or in trying to build resilience for the climate impacts that we know are coming. And of course, other states are holding that debt so I think we see that, that there’s this power imbalance that really shapes the way that different countries are preparing to face climate change. 

And at the same time we’re seeing, like I said, these shifting power dynamics between countries. So we’ve got the rising influence of China, which has displaced the US as the world’s number one emitter. We’ve seen the emerging economies like the BRICS, so that’s Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, but it’s also growing. That coalition is really trying to challenge the authority of the US as like sort of the builder of the international system and the rising power of the global south in general. And I think that’s a positive thing because we’re seeing a real meaningful push to try and reform the sort of international architecture that allows this unsustainable debt to be held. 

LT: Thanks Katie. Picking up on the issue that you mentioned this changing dynamics in the south, Global South. Leo, what’s your view? You’re working in the region, you work really with all the major powers and the countries for years. What do you see on the table in 2025 in terms of geopolitics? 

LHP: Thanks, Lauri. The geopolitics is really entered our living rooms and conversations in a very visceral way in recent months. It’s perhaps useful to think of geopolitics, not just as a field of study or method of inquiry anymore, but really as, an active and sometimes quite unruly agent, really influencing outcomes and potentially disrupting our work and our endeavors in a very direct way. 

You know, how does it behave? What informs that? And you noted this crisis of confidence. I think that is a really crucial element here: the undermining of trust in the ability, the capacity of the international community to manifest collectively on an issue. And when we have the hegemonic guarantor of global public goods that has withdrawn from that role, that really creates a gap, right, a gap in the international system. And what we see now, I think, are really different visions contesting to fill that gap left by the US withdrawal and its role as a guarantor of global public goods. 

And so I think this is a very fluid, very interesting time. There is a muscle memory in this region. We’ve already been through such a kind of transition from one stable state to another in terms of my own memory the, you know, the transition from the Cold War to the, Pax Americana thereafter. You might recall, you know, actually one of the big events that’s happening this year, is the 70th anniversary of the Bandung Conference.  

This was a similar moment in time where the old structures were kind of melting away, and we didn’t yet quite know what was emerging in its place, and there was kind of consensus around the UN Charter and the world that was being built around those principles and at the same time you had decolonization and the emergence of powers of countries, new nations, that were determined to find their own path, their own way forward. 

And I think we’re in a very similar moment with similar potential, but also, rife with similar tensions, geopolitical tensions and countries and, and communities and actors in this region are being called to do now is what is the same thing, right? Navigate these tumultuous waters that we’re in with this state of flux that we see in geopolitics. 

LT: Yes, indeed. I was born in Soviet Union and having gone through the regaining of the independence in Estonia and seeing the shifts of politics like accession to the EU and then what we see in Ukraine sharing some of the fate but going different paths that the fragility of the system and fragility of the peace is truly at the forefront.  

And the issue of decolonization, it’s interesting that we see in the vocabulary recurring or coming back to the old concepts of power struggles, great powers and denial perhaps of agency for the small entities. Philip, How is this perceived in Africa within the countries and the organizations that you’re working and partnering? 

PO: Thank you, Lauri. When it comes to Africa, we see also some changes that are also impacting on the work that we do. But I just wanted to go back to the theme about leadership because I think in all the work that we do, leadership is very central. 

When you look at what’s happening in Africa just between last year and this year, we expect to have an election in close to 50 percent of the countries – about 23 countries. Last year, we had elections in 13 countries in Africa. This year we expect about 10 or 11. So that’s  quite significant because when we see in situations where there’s a change of leadership, sometimes we see leaders that come in with very visionary ideals are able to drive an agenda that resonates with the sustainability. 

At the same time, I think it’s also the situation that you can then also have leaders that are not necessarily supportive of sustainability ideals. So leadership transformation is very critical when it comes to Africa.  

And I also just want to say that also apart from the countries within the region, we are going to see a change in transition in leadership of the African Union Commission. In February, the African leaders would elect a new commission secretariat in Addis Ababa. And of course, that’s also going to have a huge impact in terms of the direction that Africa takes. 

We see the discussion also focusing on 2025 being a year that really focuses on development. The G20 presidency is being held by South Africa, the first time that the G20 meeting Summit will be held in Africa. And this is significant because part of what we see is the drive by many African countries to also look at alternative ways in terms of advancing the economic development and economic priority so the tradition of development financing organizations have not been as responsive, and so we see Africa taking huge steps in terms of getting into the G20, the African union got admission as a permanent member to the G20 two years ago. And I think it’s very interesting, given the geopolitics, that already the theme for the G20 Summit is focused on solidarity, promoting equality and sustainable development, so that’s really very important to see what are the priorities of the South. It’s a fact that in this situation that Africa is trying to lead an advancement in acknowledging in the sense of those three thematic areas.  

LHP: I really wanted to echo what I thought was a really important point that Philip made about this moment, really calling for courageous leadership. And I think that is very true, and you see leadership, as Philip was also saying, coming from different and unexpected quarters as well. And this is one of the things that makes me a little bit hopeful in this moment, is that you see leadership responding to the opportunity that’s presented in front of it.  

And broadly speaking I think there are three ways that one can react to geopolitical fluidity or uncertainty, right, the flux that we’re in. One is to ignore the reality of it, the ostrich bearing its head kind of response. The other is to be reactive, which is where most countries are like in a conversation, for example, where big announcements about an NDC (Nationally Determined Contribution) were being put on hold to wait for what would happen in the US because there was a sense that whatever was going to be announced had to be reactive to that, right? So there’s a lot of reactivity.  

Where I see the biggest opportunity is in the third way of reacting, which is to proact. My work is really about helping countries and actors and communities show up and engage in a proactive way with a vision of what they want to be striving towards and the possibilities, understanding of the possibilities that are opening up here. 

LT: Really important point, and it would be really nice to delve deeper into, because indeed, the first Trump presidency, there was the response, we will get through it. And indeed, the many kinds of damage control was being done, but it seems to me that at least there are signs of bigger challenges to the international system. 

I mean, yes, the international withdrawing from the Paris agreement for the second time. We know the game, but now it seems that the stakes are higher in terms of trade wars, physical wars, and also the climate emergency is bigger.  

So, Katie, what’s your feeling? Are we ready to share Leo’s slightly hopeful positive note that we will rise up to the challenge or that we will see new leadership from, you know, Asia or Africa or Global South. 

KB: Yeah, I really loved Leo’s characterization of geopolitics as an unruly agent because I feel that we are moving from a relatively stable state to an unstable state. 

And it’s also interesting to hear both Lauri and Leo reflect on your own pasts. And as an American, like I was born into like the height of American hegemony and now I’m living through that withdrawal. And in a lot of ways, I mean, as someone who sits abroad, you know, I think that that could be a very positive thing for the world even as we are sort of being destabilized by it, but then I think a lot about what’s going to fill that vacuum. In some ways, I think it’s difficult for me to be optimistic because a lot of those states that are stepping in to fill the vacuum are authoritarian and reflect very different values than at least the ones that were espoused under American hegemony. 

But then also, I think that this unpredictability is something that does give me hope in the sense that we just really don’t know what’s going to happen. And so we don’t know that what’s going to have negative outcomes. I think that I also draw a lot of hope from, as someone who studies climate adaptation, from human resilience, I think that we have shown as a species tremendous resilience, and we will continue to show that resilience through this unpredictability and through the climate crisis.  

So I will say in this exact moment it’s not easy to find hope, but at the same time I think there’s always a choice between hope and despair. And I think that as we move into this very unstable period we should also keep in mind that we may be surprised by the outcomes.  

LT: But digging also deeper into the despair part, what are your main fears then for this year? Philip maybe? 

PO: Thanks Lauri. I think I’m not in the class of despair. I think I’m very hopeful. The reason I’m hopeful actually because when I see what is happening particularly in Africa, we have a huge population, a huge share of youthful population. If you look across history, you see that the people that have always brought change has been the youth. We are seeing that happening across Africa.  

We talk about leadership, I think many of you may have seen what happened in Senegal, for example, has a very young president and that was literally because young people in that country sort of say they wanted change.  

In July last year we saw a lot of issues coming up out of Kenya where I’m based here. Again it was a lot of youth taking up leadership and that has brought the leaders to start to have a conversation with the young people.  

I think when I look at history, I’m quite hopeful about the fact that we saw the Fridays For Future movement and so on. In South Africa, where we talked about the G20, we saw the role that the youth played in terms of fighting against apartheid.  

So I’m quite hopeful because I think that young people are getting very uncomfortable with the status quo. And I think with time that we’re going to push about some changes with political governance and democracy. 

LHP: I feel that fear is very legitimate, very understandable. Despair is, I feel we all go through that, right, in some way, but my hope is that we don’t get stuck there. As Katie and Philip have noted, this loosening of the norms and the status quo entrenchment creates really exciting possibilities, right? 

And I think that’s what’s energizing. Some of the young people I see around me are really sensing that this is a historic moment of shift and therefore of opportunity.  

This despair and fear that you talk about is reflected in the way that we’re seeing different regions in the world react to the climate crisis. So I think we’re seeing in the North America and in Europe, we’re seeing this tendency to sort of build walls, literally, but also kind of batten the hatches and like close the doors and say like we need to ride this out. And I think we need to choose the opposite path, we need to think about like building collective resilience and working cooperatively because otherwise it’s not going to work. 

I don’t actually think that the biggest threat to the credibility of the Paris Agreement is the US withdrawal. I think that the US withdrew last time, the Paris Agreement continued right along, and the rest of the world kind of rallied around it, and if anything, it just undermined sort of US credibility on the world stage.  

But I think the real threat to the credibility of the agreement is the fact that emissions are continuing to rise. And I think that if we’re going to have this cooperative framework, we need to start seeing results from it. And that takes collective effort.  

So I think a lot of our work at SEI is on trying to make this argument around the need for collective effort, especially to think about adaptation  and resilience as a collective challenge that we need to not be just focusing on what we do at home, but also thinking about how investing in building resilience across the world actually makes us all stronger. And I think hope and belief in the future is a really key and maybe undervalued element of that. 

LT: Indeed. That’s true that these challenges and very hard situations create opportunities. We are working from SEI Tallinn, for example together with our colleagues from Stockholm, we are working to support Georgia, Ukraine, Armenia, Moldova in the green transition planning. And what we see, I mean, all of those countries are torn by conflicts currently, obviously most notably Ukraine in a full-scale war, but now the political tensions in Georgia. Similarly, the energy weaponization in Moldova in Transnistria region. 

But on the other hand, we see from the people working with them that it creates an opportunity for change. There’s a lot of commitment also making reforms. What we recommend is be selfish in a sense that build renewable energy because that’s your energy security. You’re less vulnerable for the external energy weaponization, these strategies. Could it be that countries are realizing that they can be selfishly do good for their climate and environment and it’s also economic strategy? 

Is it becoming a thing? Because this is what we see, you know, the solar energy prices are dropping, battery storage prices are dropped 40 percent through scaling up the supply chain and innovation and so on. Is it becoming an actual economic strategy and less about, only norms, agreements and doing the, let’s say, obligatory dance in international fora? Leo? 

LHP: I absolutely agree. I loved Katie’s points also about the Paris Agreement is actually geopolitically resilient, right? And what we saw actually last time is there were structures that manifested in response to the US withdrawing that actually built resilience. 

There’s been a rehearsal of this already with Trump one, right? That cities stepping up, companies stepping up. As you say, Lauri, the real economy is moving the direction where it actually makes more sense is the green transition, is that economic strategy that makes sense for country’s own development. 

And I think the moment now that we’re in is actually gives us this opportunity to rethink and reframe and really embed climate action within nationally owned narratives and visions of development. And I think the biggest gift of this moment is in opening that because we don’t have the global hook to hang the NDCs on anymore. And actually the Paris Agreement is designed to enable bottom-up action. It’s designed to meet countries where they are. And actually, countries where they are, as you say, Lauri, most of them realize that green is gold, that green is resilient. That low carbon unlocks opportunity. It unlocks benefits for society. It’s a more viable and desirable development path. 

So what I’m watching is there’s going to be a coalescing around a new narrative emerging around climate and nature action. That’s not just kind of this passive reactivity to an agenda that’s set elsewhere, but actually grabbing, embracing,  embedding climate action within a nationally vibrant vision of development. 

LT: Philip, are you seeing in Africa kind of a narrative change, in a sense, how green transition is presented? Is it for more environmental issues, or is it an economic strategy? Or is it a security independence strategy? What’s the framing goal? Do you see shifts there? 

PO: In Africa, it’s actually more about economic growth. I think the green transition is offering opportunities. In practice, actually, we start to see some very practical things. So, for example, in the streets of Nairobi now you have electric buses, you didn’t see that 10 years ago. You see that big drive towards electric mobility that’s happening. We are seeing huge interest and investment in renewable energy, solar energy and wind energy. I think it’s in response, of course, to looking at one, opportunities that can help promote economic growth because Africa, of course, is still having a challenge of infrastructure deficits. So economic growth and capital are required for infrastructure investment. 

But secondly, of course, also building a resilient future. And that’s, of course, looking at what opportunities exist in the different sectors, whether it’s in energy, whether it’s in transport. At SEI Africa, we are doing a lot of work on bioeconomy, working with some of the cities in terms of how they could add value to their bio-based waste to produce biofertilizer, for example, that can then power agriculture. So this kind of opportunities present themselves in across different sectors. 

LT: All these changes that we are talking about that it’s becoming more economic strategy, they need to be backed up by finance. I mean, finally money talks in a sense that if we see great influx of investments, if we see things happening, the projects become bankable, then we are there where we want it. This means that we have created regulatory environment, strategic environment, and these investments make sense. 

What are we seeing on a financial landscape? Katie, you worked specifically on finance. What do you see? Are we seeing these changes happening that indeed that the finance is also picking up or do we see still challenges there? 

KB: I think the answer is both. So I think on the mitigation side, we are seeing the finance picking up. I think there’s economic rationale to invest like we’ve been talking about to investing in renewable energy that doesn’t really need much more explaining, or persuasion, anymore. It’s just a logical business case in many parts of the world. 

So we’re starting to see, you know, that this private finance that has been long expected is starting to sort of crowd in and fill this void. And so that’s I think that’s a really positive sign and it’s worth saying that that’s going to continue to happen in the US, and US investors are nothing if not driven by the dollar and the return on investment. So they’re going to continue to be investing in this regardless of the political climate. There’s really no turning that ship around even if the rhetoric out of the Trump administration is different. 

But I think the real shortfall is on adaptation and resilience building. I think that we had, coming out of COP, a pretty disappointing outcome that basically just continued to the status quo. And like I said, the status quo for mitigation is, you know, it’s trending in the right direction. The status quo for helping people, especially the poorest people in the world, get ready for climate change or adapt to what’s already happening is well, well short of where it needs to be. And it doesn’t have the same business logic. This is not a return on investment case, it’s a public goods case. It’s a preserving cultures, preserving livelihoods rationale, and it requires an entirely different type of public investment. And right now, the geopolitical environment makes that extremely difficult. Many countries are withdrawing inward and thinking less about supporting other countries and so it’s become even more difficult to rally around this need to build collective resilience.  

So I think we’re sort of seeing that there is a fork in the road here where mitigation is the finances starting to materialize in the way we need at the scale we need, whereas adaptation is really trending in the wrong direction, unfortunately. 

LT: What’s your feeling Leo, Philip, in terms of finance, if you look at Asia, Africa? 

LHP: It’s as Katie was saying, it’s nowhere near adequate is that the gap is much larger than any indications that give us confidence that on current trends, we’re nowhere near plugging that gap. 

But I think the quantity issue is just one part of the equation. And Katie also started touching on some qualitative aspects of this finance, where it comes from. And the bigger point about finance is, I think as long as we’re talking about green finance rather than greening finance as a whole and system, you know, looking at the whole need in the international financial system for fundamental reforms addressing major barriers to finance, such as crippling debt. The fact that countries, developing countries, spend more servicing their debt than they do on health and education, let alone climate. This is a systemic issue. So finance: yes, it’s far inadequate, yes, we need much more of it. We need a better quality of it that better addresses development priorities, countries needs and development. 

You know this, I live in a region that is amongst the most vulnerable to climate change. Yet crumbs of the already inadequate climate finance cake are going to support communities to build resilience at the front lines of climate impacts. So this is a real systemic issue. And I feel like we get lost in these broad dynamics and the broken kind of equation. And we’ve been caught in this pattern whereby ambition and progress internationally are held hostage to funding, generosity from the North, from a small number of countries, by the way, which at best will struggle to marginally increase their public financing this year. 

So I think what we have, what we see now is a really interesting moment where  different pathways are possible. And we saw beginnings of this,  at COP 29, despite it falling short in many important aspects, one thing that I thought was interesting coming out of there is the quantitative finance goal. This is the comprehensive finance, new finance commitment coming out of COP. There was a loosening of this North South pattern, right? There was an acknowledgement that Southern flows, including from, you know, countries like China, which made a big, I think it was 177 billion RMB or I get my numbers wrong here, but basically a big number right from China committed to being counted as climate finance. 

This marks a real departure from a real possibility for new dynamics around financing. Because what it opens up is the possibility of South-South collaboration, not diminishing any of the moral responsibility on rich countries to pony up more. But we needn’t and shouldn’t wait for rich countries to get their act together and loosen the financing taps to do more for ourselves between ourselves. Global South solidarity as a means of getting towards the quantum of finance that’s needed. 

KB: If I can just add something to that really quickly, I completely agree with everything Leo said, but I also think there’s another dimension to this when we’re thinking about the sort of collapsing of the North South divide, which is that last year, China surpassed the EU in terms of historical emissions. 

So we’re seeing what has been a very clear sort of set of responsibilities on states begin to sort of fracture and become less clear and also when we’re looking into the future and we’re looking at emissions trajectories that becomes even blurrier. And so I think with finance it’s becoming less clear cut whose responsibilities are to whose, and I think that seriously shifts the dynamics in very meaningful ways. 

Also just to add a major elephant in the room is fossil fuel subsidies. So in 2023 fossil fuel subsidies were more than a trillion dollars. And so we need to not just be talking about what money is going to the good things, but also how many resources are going to supporting things that we know are quite damaging. 

Though it’s also worth saying there’s a reason that states support fossil fuel subsidies, which is that that is basically the stability of their economies and their social systems. So it’s not that they’re evil people who are making bad choices for the future, but you know, there are major consequences for taking away those sort of pillars of modern economies. So it’s quite complex and shifting very fast, I’d say. 

LT: Or it’s also protecting incumbent economic interests and not the interest of the people other than the energy companies, which we see more and more because the real fossil fuel companies, even looking back at the first Trump presidency, he was rolling back all the Obama-era regulations, but coal energy was losing jobs and solar energy was gaining jobs.  

But I wanted to kind of throw into the change in addition to the finance also the changing dynamics in terms of technology supply, and the trade wars, because what we see is that US, EU, China are all preparing and thinking about looking at how their industrial policies, tariff policies, and all the state policies can ensure the competitiveness of their economies. And just in the last week of his presidency, Biden announced limitations on access to the most sophisticated chips and the AI revolution. It seems to me that there’s a very strong pressure and risk of, especially from the AI and access to it and adoption of it, the speed of it and so on, that we are going to see the digital gap rapidly and massively again starting to increase. Is that a threat to the, let’s say, sustainable development in the Global South?  

On the other hand, what we also see is like China, which has been a big supplier of clean technologies in terms of solar and batteries globally. Actually, the market share has changed that now the Global South is more than 30 percent of already the exports. So China seems to become less perhaps vulnerable from the tariffs or sanctions or the policies, trade policies from Europe or US. 

Maybe two questions in one in a sense that do you think that these trade wars could affect and how, then the pace of green transition across the globe, and whether you see that there’s a risk of widening the digital gap from the AI, let’s say access and policies. 

LHP: China has made its development strategy premised on or contingent on this idea that the world will need to decarbonize, and there will be a need for green technologies that China would then become, you know the engine of the world for. And this is a bet that has paid off in many ways for the climate and as well as for China. It’s 60 percent or upwards of 60 percent of green technologies now are produced in China. For some segments it’s almost, you know, it’s total dominance, right? If it’s batteries or EVs. And you can see that in the streets, as you know, Philip was saying in Kenya, in Bangkok, you see this happening in real time in front of your eyes. The dominance of Chinese technology, green technologies, flooding the streets and industrial parks in developing countries.  

The way I look at China is like water. If you don’t prepare your irrigation to receive water in a way that helps you irrigate your crops, your crops are going to get flooded, right? And this is, I think, the challenge for developing countries faced with this very big push from China to get its technology, its green technology out to market. Trade barriers are certainly a concern. 

  

Third party countries, countries like in Thailand. We need to figure out for ourselves what we need, right, and where we get it in the world without excluding whether it’s the US or China on the basis of their political rivalry. That’s their problem, right? 

A very good manifestation of this new reality of technology dominance in China providing a opportunity for ambitious climate action embedded in national development visions is Africa’s green industrialization initiative.  

And actually, if you look at the whole narrative around FOCAC. FOCAC is the Forum for China Africa Cooperation. It’s been around since the early 50s, but it’s become almost entirely focused on this idea of green transition. How can China and African countries be partners in the green transition in a way that supports African countries industrializing, having a kind of ladder to development that is green rather than repeating the mistakes of the West and going down the fossil fuel dependent path. 

Trade wars are a concern. They will retard and make climate action more expensive globally at a time that we can’t afford for it to do so. But at the same time, I think we just the sheer momentum of the economic opportunity is moving in the  direction of these kinds of deals as we see with FOCAC. We saw it also with the China, a big deal that China made with Indonesia on energy transition. 54 billion dollars committed to from China to supporting Indonesia and its green transition, which, by the way, if you compare with the JETP (Just Energy Transition Plans) which has some of the big European countries in America behind it, that adds up to 20 billion. 

China-South cooperation and South-South cooperation opens up the door to doing much more with the instruments that the Paris Agreement offers, including on technology transfer. It’s something that doesn’t get mentioned a lot or used a lot in current kind of North-South dynamics, but something that’s I think it’s going to be much more practical and relevant and useful for, and much more strongly manifested, in South-South cooperation, climate cooperation deals. 

LT: But obviously life has also shown that Chinese investments do come with certain strings attached and a political interest as well. But Philip, maybe a very quick reaction to see trade wars and these digital divides. Is it a challenge for Africa region, or is it an opportunity, rather again, pushing for local solutions and production capacity to be invested in? 

PO: Yeah, thank you. I was just thinking about Leo’s example of the African green industrialization that was launched at COP 28. And this was actually a direct outcome from the Africa Climate Summit in 2023. I think there are three things which we want to look at when it comes to, of course, issues about trade issues about technology. 

And also, Lauri, I just want to link this to development because when we talk about financing, the question about finance alone is not enough. How do you translate the finance to actual change, whether it’s in terms of sector activities?  

And the three things which are important there. One, of course, when it comes to technology, you talk about software. Secondly, you have to talk about the skills, the people with expertise, of course, to use that technology. And I think the third one is actually the infrastructure.  

What we see in Africa is a situation where there’s quite a lot of people with the skills. Many countries in Africa are now positioning themselves to export labour, high value labour, in terms of technological skills to different regions of the world. We see that in bilateral agreements, on labour agreements, between several countries. Kenya has been at the forefront in signing, for example, labour agreement with Germany, where they can actually then be able to export skills, people with skills, to operating highly technological issues. 

The challenge we see, I think it is in infrastructure. We don’t have that much infrastructure. Africa is actually lagging when it comes to infrastructure, and that’s the reason we start to see this shift around geopolitics and international relations. A lot of arrangements that exist between African countries and China currently is based on the investment that China has been putting up political infrastructure in the continent in many different countries. So whether it’s transport infrastructure, whether it’s sort of infrastructure for internet connectivity, and so on.  

I was just looking at actually the World Academy of Sciences characterization of technologically lagging countries across the world, and 66 of them, 40 of them in Africa. So the investment in research and science, of course, is still very low. The ambition at the African Union level is for at least every country to invest 2 percent of their GDP on science and technology but currently we have just about one or two countries, including South Africa, that has reached about 2 percent level of investment on science and technology. So without that investment on science and technology, of course, technological capacity is going to be weak within this continent. And it will depend on a lot of relationships with other regions of the world. 

LT: We have had really rich discussions so far, but it’s time for starting wrapping up. If we will do a podcast in a one year’s time, would these be the same topics that we talk in one year’s time or two? Which of these things do you think is a more short-term challenge and might be subject to change, which of them are long-term, like a trend or a challenge? 

KB: Looking forward, I think like we’ve said many times, unpredictability is the name of the game right now. So it’s hard to say a year from now, but I definitely think all of the things that we discussed today will continue to be relevant and then new things that we didn’t see coming will emerge. But yeah, thank you very much for the discussion. It was really great to just chat with you all.  

LT: Leo, what do you see of the topics maybe you think might be rising even more as importance or maybe dropping in terms of pressing?  

LHP: I think, a key theme here is really just complexity and unpredictability of the times that we’re in. But I do think that these issues will certainly remain relevant and important. I expect that a year from now, we’ll probably look back with some retrospective sense of maybe naivete, but I have no doubt that the issues that we talked about will remain [01:04:00] relevant because these are not issues that have any easy resolution. These are the undercurrents that we’re facing in our work and that I expect we’ll be continuing to face.  

My hope, to end on a hopeful note, is that this year will be the year where we see a different narrative starting to coalesce around development-led vision of climate action, and around solidarity and cooperation as an alternative to this kind of North-South pattern that has held up progress and has held up ambition for far too long. We need new dynamics to set in. And I’m hopeful that the fluidity that we’re seeing opens up avenues for new paths to reveal themselves. 

LT: Philip, where will we be in one year’s time in terms of those issues?  

PO: Yeah, it’s difficult to predict. I mean, I guess in terms of finance we are looking forward to what comes out of the Financing for Development conference in Spain this summer [The Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4)]. I think it’s in June and July. And of course, just to note, of course, that I think there’s a bit of fatigue on the conferencing under the UN just because the follow-up hasn’t been that massive. So I think it’s quite an important conference, but has received the least attention yet for regions like Africa. That’s actually the most important conference compared to even COPs. 

I think, Lauri, the other thing that I guess we didn’t dwell so much on, but is critical is issues about conflict and security. You earlier on talked about, you know, the highest military expenditure, I think in 2023. I think when we look at the region where I’m based, we are seeing sort of one emerging a new protracted conflict going on, but we’re also seeing a challenge actually that solving existing conflict, whether they’re intrastate conflict or interstate conflict, is becoming very difficult. 

LT: Thank you, Philip. Indeed. Thank you so much for coming to the panel to our podcast. And this has been really excellent and interesting discussion. And there’s so much to talk about. 

Perhaps less despair and more hope because if I think and talk to my colleagues who have worked for more than 30 years at SEI, there’s a cycle of hope and despair going on every few years and the only thing that helps in our field of sustainability is the perseverance and conviction and talking to each other and giving strength to each other. So, thank you very much for chipping in and having this discussion and thanks to all the listeners as well. 

Credit:

Music: Ballinger Thought Process (Alt Music) (Instrumental) via Triple Scoop Music / Getty Images.

Voiceover: Intro and outro by Arati Davis, SEI Senior Fellow.