Emerging China reshapes the geography of global unequal ecological exchange from 2000 to 2024

ABSTRACT The global renewable transition is widely celebrated as a solution to the climate crisis, yet many “green” projects reproduce imperial and patriarchal structures of domination. This article argues that climate futures cannot be secured within capitalist frameworks of growth and accumulation, which externalize ecological costs to the Global South while marginalizing Indigenous and feminist knowledges. Drawing on ecosocialist and degrowth theory, alongside ecologically unequal exchange (EUE), decolonial, and ecofeminist perspectives, the paper analyzes how green colonialism manifests in renewable energy supply chains, labor displacement, and technocratic climate governance. It contends that ecosocialist degrowth – combining the reduction of destructive production with democratic planning, reparations, and care-centered economies – offers the only viable alternative to capitalist “green” modernity. By engaging grassroots struggles and internationalist justice claims, the article outlines pathways for just ecosocialist transitions rooted in energy democracy, global redistribution, and relational ecological care.

ABSTRACT Virtual water trade not only influences the allocation of water resources but also affects regional economic growth. By utilizing the multiregional input–output model, virtual water flows and economic value-added transfers in China during the period 2007–2017 were calculated. The findings confirm an inequitable exchange of water resources in China’s provincial trade. Underdeveloped regions are more likely to suffer a double loss of virtual water and economic value-added outflows, whereas developed regions have a siphoning effect on their surroundings. Overall, the unequal exchange of water resources in China gradually improved.

In 2008, the United States lowered the occupational and ambient air emissions standards for lead, but the regulations remained unchanged in Mexico. This has driven hundreds of millions of lead batteries across the border for recycling as U.S.-based companies side-step higher domestic compliance costs. In doing so, they perpetuate the unequal valuation of labor and human health commonplace across the U.S.-Mexico border. One company, Clarios, owns two of the largest lead smelters south of the border processing more than two-thirds of the batteries completing the U.S.-Mexico arbitrage cycle in recent years. Such leveraging of regulatory asymmetries is one dimension of ecologically unequal exchange wherein firms located in a more dominant nation shift the costs of pollution intensive production. In this regard, the U.S.-Mexico border does not simply reflect but produces racialized environmental violence as batteries flow freely but people do not. The veracity of this violence is detectable in the blood of those laboring under a three-fold higher occupational standard and the children living in the shadow of smelter facilities operating with ten-fold greater threshold for the imposition of ambient, lead-laced, air releases. The lead acid battery trade between the U.S. and Mexico underscores environmental load displacement by way of the secondary recovery of materials, amid differing regulatory standards, and a central contradiction within an industry widely touted as the most ecologically modern manufacturing sector in the United States.

Debunking competition - Global ecologically unequal exchange explained by exploitation and control relations

Growing global resource demand is intensifying ecological inequality. Our integrated biophysical and governance analysis of 65 Pan-Eurasian nations shows that by 2050, under a business-as-usual pathway, 90 % of ecological overload (measured by the ecological carrying index, ECI) will occur in lower-income, agriculture-dependent countries (ECI > 1.2). Burdens are highly uneven: the poorest 50 % of countries bear 70 % of the overload, while the richest 10 % account for only 5 %. Even under a sustainability-oriented pathway, aggregate ecological pressure falls by only ∼4 %, indicating persistent governance challenges. Our governance assessment highlights that Central/Eastern Europe generally maintains sustainable ecological levels (ECI < 1.2) under decentralized-but-coordinated arrangements, while parts of South Asia exhibit fragmented institutions associated with high stress (ECI > 2.0). To address these imbalances, we outline three institutional reforms: (1) artificial-intelligence-supported land-use planning coupled with World Trade Organization-compliant ecological tariffs, (2) payment for ecosystem service mechanisms targeted to high-ECI regions, and (3) mandatory due diligence for deforestation-linked imports. These measures provide an operational pathway for implementing equitable (“just”) planetary boundaries under the post-2020 Convention on Biological Diversity, advancing accountability and fairness in Earth System Governance. • By 2050, half of Pan-Eurasia and Northeast Africa face overload, 90 % are low-income. • Towards sustainability scenario cuts burden despite limited gains in ecological supply. • The poorest 50 % bear 70 % of the burden, while the richest 10 % bear only 5 %. • Central/Eastern Europe shows <10 % deficits while South and Southeast Asia exceed 2 × .

Quiet quitting is predominantly framed in the literature as a form of disengagement, declining commitment, or motivational deficiency. This conceptual paper challenges such deficit-oriented interpretations by re-examining quiet quitting through the lenses of Critical Theory and Social Exchange Theory. The study argues that dominant discourses of commitment and discretionary effort present extra-role contribution as a natural expectation of employees, thereby downplaying structural power asymmetries in contemporary employment relationships. Under conditions of intensified work demands and unequal exchange, quiet quitting is conceptualized as a rational and silent form of resistance rather than organizational dysfunction. By embedding social exchange processes within a critical framework, the paper offers a theoretical re-framing of withdrawal as a politically meaningful response to contested reciprocity at work. Overall, the paper suggests that quiet quitting should not be dismissed as organizational dysfunction, but interpreted as a signal of contested legitimacy and strained reciprocity in contemporary employment relationships. Recognizing this reframing invites scholars and practitioners alike to reconsider how silence, engagement, and resistance are theorized and managed in modern organizations.

Unequal Exchange, Structural Dependency and Emergence

Background The Blue Economy has emerged as the dominant paradigm for ocean governance, promising to reconcile economic expansion with environmental protection through technological innovation and market instruments. However, it rests on theoretically precarious commitments: absolute decoupling of growth from environmental degradation, techno-managerial universalism, and marketisation of marine commons. Synthesising degrowth scholarship and political ecology, this article exposes how growth-compatible ocean governance reproduces dispossession, value extraction, and ecological burden transfer in Global South contexts. Methods This literature-based study uses purposive sampling and thematic synthesis, centring degrowth as the primary theoretical lens and deploying political ecology concepts — enclosure, spatial fix, and ecologically unequal exchange — to trace causal mechanisms through which Blue Economy policies produce unjust distributive outcomes. An illustrative composite vignette from Indonesian coastal contexts anchors the theoretical argument. Results Six interrelated critiques document widely observed tendencies in Blue Economy governance: its epistemic framing entrenches techno-managerial universalism at the expense of plural values and local knowledges; decoupling assumptions are empirically fragile, undermined by rebound effects and problem-shifting; market instruments commodify commons and enable governance capture; Blue Economy projects function as spatial fixes reproducing accumulation by dispossession; distributional outcomes are regressive; and techno-optimism masks problem-shifting. The article advances Blue Degrowth as a normative alternative grounded in five principles — limits and sufficiency, anti-colonial delinking, commons governance, local value retention, and precaution and democratic deliberation — with policy modalities including customary tenure recognition, cooperative processing, precautionary moratoria, and alternative metrics beyond GDP. Conclusions Blue Degrowth offers a theoretical framework for just ocean governance that fundamentally departs from growth-centric paradigms, though its causal mechanisms require empirical testing and its policy modalities will need contextual adaptation across diverse Global South settings. Future research should test causal mechanisms through comparative studies, develop participatory sufficiency metrics, and explore coalition-building strategies for implementation in diverse Global South settings.

This article explores labour importism (LI) as a process of labour provisioning whose organising principle is the importation of temporary migrant workers. The analysis is developed around the Arab Gulf States (AGS), the most notable cases of LI in the post-war era. To begin, LI is fleshed out through a ‘history of the present’ genealogy that excavates archival material of the British colonial bureaucracy, the first to systematically administer LI in the AGS. Its lineages are traced from the fin de siècle until the 1970s, the pivotal decade in which LI expanded at scale and was institutionally embedded across all the AGS, continuing to shape migration policy until today. The article then analyses the contemporary social reproduction of LI using the lenses of social difference, global labour arbitrage based on unequal exchange, and super exploitation. As an empirically derived, analytically versatile and spatio-temporally dynamic conceptualisation, LI can overcome the shortcomings associated with state, market, or capital accumulation-centric approaches to labour migration in the AGS and beyond.

Beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank implemented neoliberal structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) across most countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. SAPs imposed austerity, privatisation and economic deregulation and have been associated with severe negative impacts on human welfare, including (a) declining real wages and working-class consumption, (b) increased rates of poverty and basic-needs deprivation, (c) increased neonatal and maternal mortality and (d) reduced health system access. Structural adjustment also created conditions for increased financial outflows and drain from the global South through unequal exchange. This paper reviews evidence of these damages and proposes possible options for reparations and distributive justice. We argue that the IMF and the World Bank should be democratised and restructured-or otherwise replaced by alternative institutions-to prevent further harm.

In this work, Malthus is recognized as the true discoverer of the idea of effective demand. The power to produce and the power to consume represent the principles of the Malthusian concept of effective demand which, within the capitalist logic of unequal exchange, becomes the limit within which the mechanism of accumulation can operate. However, this mechanism cannot be left to operate spontaneously, nor can it be manipulated without running the risk of destroying it. Effective demand is assigned the role of major determinant of the price level and, therefore, of distribution and development.&amp;nbsp;Copyright© 2026 The Author(s). This article is distributed under the terms of the license CC-BY 4.0., which permits any further distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Article’s history: Received 25th of January, 2026; Revised 12th of February, 2026; Accepted 8th of March, 2026; Available online: 30th of March, 2026. Published as article in the Volume XXI, Spring, Issue 2(92), March, 2026.

This review of a selection of literature in critical geography, political ecology, eco-Marxism, and ecological economics over the past five decades reflects on the paucity of discussion on the phenomenon of modern, all-purpose money. This is paradoxical, given the almost universal denunciation of mainstream economics and capitalist political economy in this literature. The critiques of environmental injustices and uneven development tend to target an abstract capitalist ‘system’ rather than the peculiar and historically recent artefact of money through which it operates. A rethinking of the role of money in the modern world economy can unravel ambiguities in Marxian concepts of value, unequal exchange, and exploitation. In remaining confined to the hegemonic worldview, monetary framings of inequalities miss the mark of exposing the veiled material asymmetries in social metabolism. It is argued that the concept of value refers to money, rather than vice versa, while unequal exchange should be understood as asymmetric transfers of material resources, rather than values. Monetary and biophysical flows must be approached as analytically distinct phenomena, where the latter are mystified by the former. Rather than attempt to straddle this distinction, the Marxian labour theory of value can be understood as addressing a subset within a wider range of exploitative, biophysical exchange relations. The monetary theory of value indicated here appears to be aligned with some recent Marxist scholarship.

Copy number variation in multigene families composed of tandemly arrayed repeat units is shaped in part by recombination events such as unequal homologous chromosome exchange (HCE) and sister chromatid exchange (SCE). To explore the relative contribution of intrachromosomal and interchromosomal recombination to multigene family copy number dynamics in apomictic organisms, we conducted computational simulations using empirically determined parameters obtained by measuring recombination rate in the 45S rDNA of mutation accumulation lines of Daphnia obtusa. Our simulations showed that copy number variance across generations was greater when the rate of SCE exceeded that of HCE. This pattern was partially driven by the higher frequency of recombination events associated with SCE, even if HCE offset sizes were larger. These results highlight the distinct roles of recombination modes in shaping the copy number of multigene families arranged in tandem arrays.

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the climate politics of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) as a diagnostic case for the structural limitations facing eco-socialist movements under capitalism. Combining eco-Marxist critique, world-systems and ecological imperialism perspectives, and Marxist state and organizational theory, this article reconstructs DSA’s climate agenda from ideological foundations to strategic practice, and then explains why its transformative ambitions are systematically mediated by capitalist structures. The analysis highlights three interlocking limitations: the unresolved growth imperative embedded in value-driven accumulation; the imperial-core location of U.S. climate politics, which risks reproducing unequal ecological exchange and climate debt relations; and the limits of pursuing anti-capitalist goals through capitalist state institutions and Democratic Party mediation. The article argues that these contradictions – between green growth and ecological limits, national reform and global justice, and state-centered strategy and systemic transformation – are not unique to DSA but are structural conditions confronting left climate projects more broadly.

ABSTRACT This article uses the notion of crisis complex to analyse the relationship between labour migration and crisis from an institution‐ and process‐oriented perspective. Such an interrogation is timely, given the increasingly crisis‐prone dynamics shaping global labour systems and migration governance, including recruitment, skills recognition and the political privileging of temporary labour — all reinforcing a structural reliance on migrant workforces in capitalist development. Temporary labour migration from the Global South is increasingly framed as a development ‘solution’ to both unemployment in origin countries and labour and skills shortages in the Global North, precisely because its temporary and conditional nature is seen as politically palatable within contexts of anti‐migrant rhetoric and economic nationalism. These migration schemes reflect the unequal exchange between Southern and Northern regions, contributing to the exploitation and protracted precarity of migrant workers. Drawing on empirical evidence from a 2024 pilot project, this article examines how temporary labour migration is shaped by a broader crisis complex, understood as a policy solution that has emerged through a multilayered process driven by political framings, institutional logics and actor involvement across three dimensions: skills and development, governance institutions and business models.

Abstract Complete mobility of labour in the long run equalises the ‘rate of return’ to employment, independently of any particular price structure. Then, given some level of net output, aggregate net value added is proportional to aggregate labour effort, a macroeconomic equal exchange. Complete mobility of capital in the long run equalises the rate of profit, a process that creates prices that are different from the prices that directly reflect labour effort in production. Hence, microeconomic unequal exchange is the norm. Then monetised effort appears in locations different from where that effort was performed. Hence, the profit of any and every firm depends upon the exploitation of the world’s working class, and not upon the exploitation of its own workforce. Some empirical consequences of this approach are explored for the world’s largest 500 firms.

Unequal exchange of labour and global justice: Principles for a fair international distribution of work

The global energy transition (ET) is widely portrayed as a technological shift toward low-carbon systems; however, it also entails profound geopolitical and socio-environmental transformations. While energy justice (EJ) has become a key framework for assessing fairness in energy systems, it seldom incorporates the geopolitical restructuring of material, energy, and economic flows that underpin contemporary transitions. This article develops a geopolitically informed approach to EJ, trying to capture how the new flows of energy, matter, and power shape—and are shaped by—enduring centre–periphery inequalities. Using a guided literature synthesis that combines EJ, political ecology, decolonial critiques, and green extractivism, the study enhances classical EJ tenets by incorporating transboundary flows, ecological unequal exchange, ontological plurality, and local self-determination. An illustrative application to copper extraction in Chile and Peru demonstrates how critical-mineral supply chains reproduce new sacrifice zones within emerging geopolitical configurations. By connecting local socio-environmental conflicts to global energy dynamics, the framework advances a more comprehensive, multidimensional approach to justice in the ET. The findings offer conceptual and practical insights for designing more equitable and geopolitically aware sustainability policies.

Background The Blue Economy has emerged as the dominant paradigm for ocean governance, promising to reconcile maritime economic expansion with environmental protection through technological innovation and market instruments. However, it rests on theoretically precarious commitments: absolute decoupling of growth from environmental degradation, techno-managerial universalism, and marketisation of marine commons. This article develops a theoretical critique of the Blue Economy by synthesizing degrowth scholarship and political ecology to expose how growth-compatible ocean governance reproduces dispossession, intensification, and unequal exchange in Global South contexts. Methods This literature-based study employs purposive sampling and thematic synthesis to build a conceptual critique. The analysis centers degrowth as the primary theoretical lens and deploys political ecology concepts—enclosure, spatial fix, and ecologically unequal exchange—to trace causal mechanisms through which Blue Economy policies produce unjust distributive outcomes. Literature selection prioritized canonical degrowth texts, foundational political ecology works, and critical Blue Economy scholarship. An illustrative composite vignette from Indonesian coastal contexts grounds the theoretical arguments. Results The synthesis yields six interrelated critiques demonstrating that the Blue Economy’s epistemic framing privileges market valuation over plural values; decoupling assumptions are empirically fragile and undermined by rebound effects and problem-shifting; market instruments commodify commons and enable governance capture; Blue Economy projects function as spatial fixes reproducing accumulation by dispossession; distributional outcomes are regressive; and techno-optimism masks problem-shifting. The article develops Blue Degrowth as a normative alternative, articulating five principles—limits and sufficiency, anti-colonial delinking, commons governance, local value retention, and democratic deliberation—and translates these into policy modalities including legal recognition of customary marine tenure, cooperative processing, precautionary moratoria, and alternative metrics beyond GDP. Conclusions Blue Degrowth offers a framework for just ocean governance that fundamentally breaks from growth-centric paradigms. Future research should test causal mechanisms through comparative studies, develop participatory sufficiency metrics, and explore coalition-building strategies for implementation in diverse Global South settings.