Forging Ahead: Green Internationalism for a Multipolar World

Introduction: In Search of a New Model

Faced with the transition to a multipolar world amid an escalating climate crisis, states must adapt and transform. In the UK, the government faces a stark choice between defending an increasingly violent, unstable US-led order or forging an internationalist strategy that supports a transition to a democratic, secure and sustainable global regime. However, as documented in the first part of this two-part essay, despite its contradictions and crisis-prone tendencies, the neoliberal regime that the UK helped create and enforce remains potent, even as it begins to be unwound. While its domestic economy harms people at home, the UK economy has also contributed to the long-term dynamics of underdevelopment, insecurity and instability across the Global South. And as the US destabilises the world order through threats against its allies, trade wars and violent exercises of imperial power, Britain’s “special” relationship with the US carries growing costs.

As the Trump regime attacks the global green transition, withdraws from multilateral institutions, wages trade wars and threatens its allies, efforts to promote sustainable development and multilateralism are underway elsewhere, albeit with mixed outcomes. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)’s Just Energy Transition Partnerships (JETPs) aim to “de-risk” decarbonisation, but are failing to mobilise the promised capital and undermining the sovereignty of Global South states. Rising South–South regional cooperation seeks to provide insulation against the instabilities of the global economy. The Chinese Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) promises to green its investments even as its fossil fuel projects continue to dominate. Emerging economies like South Africa have sought to use the G20 to advance sustainable development and justice, only to be unceremoniously ejected by Trump. Calls have been made for alignments among middle powers and for policies of “variable geometry”, which seek different coalitions of states for different issues based on common interests and values. Meanwhile, the UK has sought to bridge gaps with the European Union and the Global South as its relationship with the US unwinds. Yet, many of these initiatives risk reinscribing the same logics that have contributed to our current moment — Cold War, economic stagnation and planetary crisis.

Instead, this essay advocates a more ambitious approach to addressing the crisis of the global order and the UK’s place within it. This agenda starts by reconstructing Britain’s domestic economic model. Deploying the frameworks of green economic planning, supporting socio-ecological transformation and green (re)industrialisation, a new economic regime in the UK would improve living standards, productivity and sustainability, and strengthen public services — all of which are functionally necessary for the UK to recalibrate its relationship with the rest of the world. If these domestic reforms were implemented, the UK’s foreign policy could be transformed to support a new green internationalism grounded in multilateral relationships built on green industrial collaboration, technology transfer and reparative finance. In contrast to the destabilising alternative of naively adhering to US leadership, this foreign policy transformation would promote global development, collective safety and sustainability, offering a step beyond the old playbook of preaching universalist ideals and democratic norms while nevertheless violently imposing structural adjustment programs, corporate power and military interventions on the Global South. Rather, amid the unwinding of old economic norms, foreign policy transformation can offer materially and qualitatively differentiated relationships as part of collective, non-aligned green industrial partnerships and diplomacy. Not only would this provide the British economy with a foothold in a rapidly changing world, but it would also be a crucial step toward creating a new global order oriented toward collective prosperity, security and sustainability.

New Foundations: Green Economic Planning and Transformation

As a middle power, the UK does not have the capacity to transform or decarbonise the global economy on its own. Short of a global transformation of capitalism, the UK can however rebuild its domestic economy to operate more sustainably, by reorienting it toward productive green sectors. To this end, green economic planning and green (re)industrialisation offer a vital opportunity to reorganise the UK economy through social and ecological transformation and, in turn, lay the foundations for a new green internationalist agenda.

Green economic planning is a “form of state-led decarbonisation whereby the state designs and implements structural complementarities between macro-financial architectures, industrial policy, and private sector incentives”. ¹ Operating within our capitalist present, green economic planning simultaneously recognises the failures of the market-driven liberal environmental status quo and the imperative of significantly expanding the role of an interventionist green state to drive socio-ecological transformation. ² States can do this — despite the constraints imposed by global markets and the logic of austerity — by coordinating macro-financial, industrial policy and economic incentives across and between sectors, reorganising economic activity and patterns of public and private investment, blending coercive measures and incentives such as public finance, monetary policy interventions, subsidies, regulation and procurement to instigate the rapid scaling of green sectors and the downscaling of high-carbon sectors within the shortening time horizons we collectively face. ³

Economic planning has proved successful in recent history and remains alive today. ⁴ Although facing challenges due to the neoliberal hollowing out of state capacities, such planning has proved successful in the past, for example, in post-war France, the Netherlands and Japan. It is used effectively by some leading economies today, such as Denmark and China. For example, in post-war dirigiste France, technocratic design and implementation processes were combined with democratic oversight and stakeholder participation; state ownership of key sectors was widespread, and the Planning Commissariat, Finance Ministry and Credit Council worked with the central bank and public finance institutions to direct private capital toward strategic state priorities and to reach the technology frontier. ⁵ This regime enabled France, following the 1973 oil shock, to transition its electricity system from fossil fuels to nuclear energy in just 15 years. ⁶

In contemporary China, where the world’s most significant deployment and innovation in green technologies is taking place, a new developmental environmentalism is coordinated through five-year plans: enforced through financial, administrative and macroeconomic mechanisms combining both carrots (incentives) and sticks (coercion); delivered through a dynamic tension between central planning and decentralisation, mobilising bottom-up stakeholders, policy experimentation and intense competition among private sector firms; and guided by a macro-financial structure that combines a largely state-owned banking system with support from state-owned non-bank financial institutions (e.g. asset managers) that provide significant volumes of patient, concessional capital to public and privately owned firms in strategic sectors. ⁷ Such is China’s success with this regime that in 2024, rapidly growing green technology sectors contributed 10 per cent to GDP.

In a similar vein, deploying green economic planning in the UK would provide significant benefits. In the shorter term, while electricity generation in the UK is increasingly supplied by renewables, total energy supply — that is, all the energy needed by users in a country — remains dominated by fossil fuels. Green economic planning would enable the British state to rapidly decarbonise the economy across sectors as part of a broader socio-ecological transformation. Where the UK does not yet produce them, green technologies such as solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, buses and heat pumps could be imported at scale. In the medium to longer term, green economic planning could be used to promote broader green (re)industrialisation in the UK, restructuring the domestic economy around productive green industry and innovation, offering a more sustainable and productive economic base than its present financialised model.

In recent years, such green economic transformation has become a fundamental driver of innovation, investment and consumption across the global economy. Like all forms of capitalist development, green industrialisation and transformation involve contradictions. The trajectories of capitalist development pose significant challenges for green state projects, driven to raise labour productivity, increasingly encroach on nature, overproduce and render segments of the population outside production. ⁸ While many green industrial strategies aim to address the triple challenge of economic stagnation, precarious employment and the climate crisis by creating a virtuous cycle of investment in green manufacturing, boosting economic activity, creating good jobs and reducing climate impacts, such efforts can also risk worsening outcomes across these goals. Nonetheless, efforts can be made to embed democratic and just principles into strategies for green economic transformation, just as contemporary Denmark and (post-war) France successfully built processes of democratic participation into their green economic planning. ⁹

Despite China’s significant market power and technological leadership in green energy, the deep transformation required across sectors in response to the climate crisis offers vast potential for innovation and development in future green technologies, which, in turn, can spur green industrialisation. ¹⁰ The global capacity for green technologies needed to meet decarbonisation targets remains insufficient. In the UK, 85 per cent of decarbonisation plans until 2035 rely on a combination of green technologies and behaviour change. However, many of the technologies needed for decarbonisation have not yet reached a commercially viable scale. Without building sufficient domestic production capacity, middle powers like the UK and Global South states risk green technology supply shortages, supply chain inflationary pressures and increased greenhouse gas emissions from long product supply chains, which are vulnerable to shocks. Instead, by deploying the tools of green economic planning, the UK can promote the development of domestic green industries and manufacturing supply chains: creating positive economic spillovers; invigorating domestic industry; reducing regional imbalances by localising manufacturing; and expanding production across value chains, product segments and export potential. ¹¹ When interstate competition risks subsuming the material basis of the transition and diverting it from its course, green economic planning and (re)industrialisation can instead provide a platform for middle powers to not only reconstruct their domestic regimes, but in turn, advance a green internationalist and sustainable development agenda abroad, building green industrial capacity in the Global South, and supporting a more stable and resilient global economic regime to the benefit of all.

The UK economy has significant capacity for such a transformation, even if at present, it is not being realised. Levels of investment in green technologies and infrastructure remain far below what the UK economy requires to decarbonise. Delivering on climate targets will require an additional £50 billion per year by 2030 to support cross-sectoral innovation and deployment of green technologies. Although such investments entail short-term costs within an artificial environment of fiscal constraint — the UK has pledged to spend $260.9 billion per year by 2035 on national security, yet “struggles” to find the finance required to reach net-zero by 2050 — they would also yield manifold long-term returns. The transition to renewable energy is expected to save the UK economy billions, halving UK energy costs by 2050, as domestic renewable energy capacity replaces fossil-fuel imports. Beyond this, such capital investments, currently lagging behind those of other G7 economies, would support much-needed improvements in productivity, skills, infrastructure and innovation. A combination of greater resource efficiency, capacity growth, and the expansion of new sectors and services to meet domestic and international market demand would together work to enhance energy security, mitigate the climate crisis and increase export revenues.

The UK has particular potential in green services and manufacturing, both from its existing technological capacities and by developing new productive capabilities, offering not only a platform for domestic economic transformation but, crucially, a basis for recalibrating the UK’s finance, trade and foreign policy relationships. ¹² For instance, the UK manufacturing sector is small but highly productive, accounting for 9 per cent of output and only 7 per cent of employment, with strengths in high-value manufacturing and innovation across the aerospace, military and automotive sectors. There is scope to redirect military manufacturing capacity toward green industry, indicating a strategic shift away from the global projection of military power and towards climate collaboration.

The UK has other notable comparative advantages — where an economy is relatively better than others at producing a good — in some green products and technologies, ranking fifteenth globally in clean technology specialisation and ninth globally in green goods exports (2.5 per cent of global export volume). Foremost among these advantages are tidal power and offshore wind. ¹³ Such potential is supported by the UK’s strong knowledge base, scientific research and university sector, which are crucial to the development of new technologies and domestic firms but require support after nearly two decades of ideologically imposed fiscal austerity. For example, two innovative UK-based firms, Nova Innovation and Orbital Marine Power, were recently successful in securing an EU Horizon Europe innovation programme call to develop two tidal stream projects: a 4MW tidal stream energy array in Orkney and a 9.6MW floating tidal turbine array, respectively.

At present, green industrial development largely replicates existing neoliberal logics of de-risking, in which the state socialises risks, and the private sector reaps the returns. ¹⁴ In the EV sector, this serves to prop up luxury carmakers such as JLR. By contrast, a green planning approach to transport decarbonisation would involve developing transformative green technologies and infrastructure, such as universal green public transport. Not only would this be less resource-intensive than private EVs, but it would, when deployed at scale, offer broader improvements in productivity, transport access and living standards.

The development of these domestic capacities would also serve as a platform for a programme of green internationalism abroad, enabling a transformation of the UK’s foreign policy. Where the UK’s financial, trade and security relationships have helped create and enforce a global order that is deeply unstable and crisis-prone, and which constrains the sustainable development of the Global South, this new model would provide a firm foundation to support sustainable development, scaled technology transfer, reparative climate and development finance — that is, finance which reflects historical burdens of the climate crisis and is designed to reconstruct existing power hierarchies — and the development of green industrial capacity in the Global South through new democratic, collective and non-aligned multilateral institutions.

Green Internationalism: Reimagining the UK's Role in the World

While the green economic planning and industrialisation strategies outlined so far may be economically feasible in the UK, even if politically challenging to deliver, in the Global South, state capacity to engage in industrial and development planning is shaped and constrained by global supply chains, global financial hierarchy and geopolitical competition. ¹⁵  As a result, while developed economies can build comprehensive and forceful industrial strategies with relative ease, and emerging economies possess some flexibility in pursuing such strategies, developing states are significantly constrained in their capacity to do so. Supporting the growth of this capacity is vital not only for development in specific countries but also fundamental to collective security and sustainability, which are each mutually constitutive and reinforcing. With a firm footing in domestic green economic planning and industrialisation, the UK — as part of a green internationalist agenda — could support the development of new forms of collaborative green industrial diplomacy between the Global North and South, working alongside other developed economies and middle powers to recalibrate unequal terms of global trade and finance, rebuilding Global South policy space for green economic transformation and building UK alliances beyond the US.

To accomplish this, the UK should adopt a non-aligned and equitable partnership role in establishing a new multilateral institution, the Global Green Industrial Network (GGIN). In a world where existing institutions of global economic governance are chronically under-capitalised, act as enforcers of destabilising neoliberal logics to the detriment of Global South development and autonomy, and are either being actively dismantled or dominated by superpowers at the expense of Global South states, a new multilateral institution is required to support the transformation of North–South relations. ¹⁶ This would provide a platform for channelling large-scale reparative climate and development finance to the Global South, redistributing resources as compensation for historical injustices and as a means to address responsibility for the climate crisis, while providing new mechanisms for technology access, supporting Southern green industrial and sustainable development, and breaking with the neocolonial and extractive dynamics of the current global economy.

Building on the concept of “multilateral country platforms”, the GGIN would have to be democratically governed and oriented toward green industrial development in the South. Member states would hold equitable shareholdings in the network, apportioning equal voting rights and accountability. The creation of financing and development programmes would be based on the self-identified needs of individual Global South states or South–South groupings, pooling resources around shared sustainable development goals. The voices of a wide range of stakeholders, including labour unions, civil society groups and local businesses, would be embedded in the governance of the GGIN and in the design, development and delivery of any project or program, grounded in the community-empowering principles of Community Benefit Agreements (CBAs).

The GGIN would need to mobilise finance to provide loans, grants and other investment functions. This could be based on a specialised, collaborative green industrial fund under the banner of the GGIN — similar to proposals for a supranational EU fund to procure military equipment — backed by a sovereign guarantee. Such a fund would enable members to jointly and cheaply borrow in international markets by issuing long-term bonds, known as Global Green Industrial Bonds (GGIBs), which would simultaneously offer investors a financial asset that yields long-term, safe and stable returns. Although the issuance of debts requires generating some returns to service that debt, introducing some market-based logics, it would not be accompanied by the conditionalities — such as with World Bank and IMF structural adjustment programs or the Wall Street Consensus logic of “derisking” — that otherwise threaten the agency of Global South states. ¹⁷

The GGIN could be further capitalised by accepting contributions from member states in proportion to the relative size of their economies, without offering greater governance shares in exchange. While Global South states face significant fiscal and debt constraints, the UK and other advanced-economy members would need to move beyond the artificially constructed logics of scarcity. They would have to abandon their claims that all governments lack money, cannot expand their fiscal capacity, and that public banks have limited resources, and therefore require private capital mobilisation. Enhanced by new regimes built around green economic planning, states such as the UK could utilise their greater monetary sovereignty to revise existing ideologically constructed fiscal rules to exclude borrowing and reparative finance for global green industrial development from debt limits, and to increase public finance provisions, which in turn could be used to further capitalise the GGIN. ¹⁸

Coordinated by the green industrial strategies and economic planning of Global South states, large-scale, low-cost, long-term loans and reparative grants could be provided to GGIN members. Given the current parameters of the global financial system, some lending capacity would still need to take the form of concessional (low-cost) loans to ensure the GGIN could remain operational, but these would be accompanied by scaled grants for those most in need. Provisions for financing through the GGIN could be matched by debt cancellations by creditors, further reordering the international financial architecture. With long-term financing provided in local currencies to reduce exchange-rate volatility risks associated with foreign-denominated debt, loan repayment costs could also be kept relatively low.

An essential use of the finance provided through the GGIN would be to facilitate technological development in the Global South. Greater state financial capacity, acquired through concessional loans and grants from the GGIN, could be used to finance investments in new productive capacity, expand R&D infrastructure, support the development of domestic technology and innovation, and promote vital technological upgrading. ¹⁹  As has been the case with late-industrialising states such as South Korea, this is crucial to facilitating technological learning, enabling firms and states to access, adapt and build on technologies to improve production and industrial competitiveness. ²⁰ In turn, the GGIN could support Global South members in establishing procurement requirements to ensure that a majority of spending is directed to production and technological development, incentivising the scaling of production in priority sectors and promoting good governance, working conditions and environmental sustainability. New mechanisms for technology transfer — in which skills, scientific knowledge, design and technologies are transferred between actors — could be established among GGIN member states. Developed member states, such as the UK, could incentivise their domestic firms to grant green technology patents to Global South member states through subsidies as part of newly established green economic planning regimes. Either through domestic investments or technology transfer, newly developed or pre-existing technologies would be deployed by firms and actors in the Global South, enabling technological learning in line with the imperatives of green industrialisation, utilising green energy technologies and circular economy principles to avoid the high-carbon intensity models of the past. ²¹ In the long term, the network would also provide an opportunity to build a political coalition to overhaul global intellectual property governance, taking power away from multinational companies and creating space for collective technological sharing and green industrial development.

Through such mechanisms, the GGIN could support the development of Global South state capabilities in new strategic sectors or in areas of existing comparative advantage, building the enabling institutions, governance frameworks, public infrastructure, and research and innovation capacity required for this development. ²² Depending on the strategic sectors identified, these capacities could, for example, be channelled into developing regional value chains with partners, upgrading and adding value to the refining of critical minerals for export, or moving from light to heavy manufacturing of green technologies, among numerous other examples. As new industries are built, preferential (giving priority to GGIN network members) and non-conditional (without requirements for political or economic reform) agreements could be established between GGIN partners, depending on each participant’s needs, to ensure that green technologies are available to support secure supply chains and decarbonisation efforts. For Global South partners, this would be a market for produced goods and a source of export revenue in new, stable coalitions of allies and economic partners. Competition over such export markets might be fierce, but if those competitive energies can be harnessed through green economic planning to drive innovation and new market development in the technologies needed to address the climate crisis, it may prove beneficial. For the UK, which is otherwise dependent on China for minerals and green technologies, or increasingly reliant on an unreliable US for energy and security, this could increase trade, improve supply chain stability, and help reduce supply chain inflationary pressures.

Collectively, these proposals would build a coalition of states with stable supply chains for green industries, placing those supply chains under a collective interest, ensuring political non-alignment, and providing a space for collaboration with all countries around the shared project of a just green transition, global prosperity and collective security. Crucially, these efforts would move beyond replicating relationships of economic and technological dependency and would instead enable Global South states to engage in technological learning, industrial upgrading and value addition to build their own capacity for autonomous, sustainable development and green industrialisation. By doing so, efforts to transform the UK’s foreign policy, acting as an equitable partner in a new green internationalist agenda, could become a source of green industrial development and transformation in the Global South, rather than its ongoing role in processes of subordination, extraction and neocolonialism.

Conclusion

In the face of the pressing challenges of the twenty-first century, states such as the UK must rapidly evolve to support the green transformation of the global order. As Mark Carney explained at the 2026 World Economic Forum, the old economic order built around US hegemony is being rapidly dismantled, and “the question… is not whether to adapt to this new reality… The question is whether we adapt by simply building higher walls – or whether we can do something more ambitious”. Carney’s vision for this, based on domestic deregulation and increased military spending, is unlikely to meet this challenge. Instead, building a more ambitious future, one which is not only an economic opportunity for states like the UK but a necessity in the face of faltering economic models and the failures of the global system, requires developing new models of green economic planning and industrial transformation that both rebuild stagnant and unproductive domestic economies and create new industries to support the global green transition. Two sides of the same coin, in turn, this domestic capacity must serve as a foundation for recalibrating the UK’s relations with the world in the spirit of green internationalism. This internationalist agenda would support the construction of a new democratically governed and non-aligned GGIN bloc to promote the development of green industrial capacity in the Global South through reparative finance, equitable trade relationships, scaled technology transfer, and the promotion of Southern sovereignty. It is also crucial for promoting a new world order centred around global prosperity, environmental sustainability and collective security.

In the UK context, this would provide wide benefits to consumers facing price inflation, businesses concerned with their export stability and low productivity, and policymakers desperate for economic sustainability. The UK, alongside other middle powers and countries in the Global South, has the capacity to support the construction of this new green internationalist agenda, one that is democratic and participatory, stakeholder and partner-led, and one that recalibrates flows of trade, finance and technology to support the green industrial development of Global South states rather than their ongoing extraction and exploitation. Although this would mean a radical step change in the logics of economic governance and the global regime the UK has helped to create and enforce, this shift in Global North–South relations is essential. Amid rising geopolitical tensions, escalating trade wars and conflicts, stagnant development and productivity, and the looming threat of climate collapse, governments face a stark choice: either continue with their defence of a decaying, unstable and fossil-based US-led order or forge an internationalist strategy that supports the transition to a lasting democratic, secure, and sustainable global regime for all.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Ilias Alami for his thoughtful comments and feedback.