- Convenors:
-
Ibrahim Adekunle
(University of South Africa)
Kaosarat Abolanle Quadri (Olabisi Onabanjo University)
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- Chair:
-
G Adamolekun
(Edinburgh Napier University)
- Format:
- Paper panel
- Stream:
- Climate justice, just transitions & environmental futures
Short Abstract
CBAM is reshaping trade and climate governance, raising questions of power, agency, and justice for the Global South. This panel explores exclusion risks, digital inequalities, and how AI-enabled carbon tools could enable fairer, more inclusive low-carbon futures.
Description
As global climate policy enters a new phase of enforcement, mechanisms like the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) are reshaping trade, industrialisation, and environmental governance. While designed to ensure fairness and prevent carbon leakage, CBAM raises profound questions about power, agency, and futures in the Global South. For firms in the global south, especially SMEs, the CBAM presents both exclusionary risks and transformative opportunities. Compliance demands digital infrastructure, emissions data, and certification systems that many exporters currently lack, exposing deep structural inequities. Yet, emerging technologies such as AI-driven carbon accounting and digital MRV (measurement, reporting, and verification) platforms offer new forms of agency tools that could democratise participation in low-carbon trade if ethically governed. This interdisciplinary panel reimagines development through the lens of carbon governance, bringing together scholars of international political economy, ethics, and sustainability transitions. It interrogates how CBAM redistributes power between North and South, how firms in the global South negotiate agency within emerging climate regimes, and how technologies can mediate more inclusive futures. By centring ethical and justice-oriented frameworks, the session advances a critical conversation about who gets to participate in the green transition and on what terms.
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
Carbon pricing and Border Carbon Adjustments may reshape global climate governance, but they also raise ethical questions about who bears the costs. This study, therefore, examines fairness and distributive justice among firms in South Africa and Nigeria, with a focus on hard-to-abate sectors.
Paper long abstract
The global expansion of carbon pricing instruments and Border Carbon Adjustments (BCAs) is reshaping climate governance, yet their ethical implications for firms in developing and middle-income economies remain insufficiently understood. While these mechanisms aim to internalise carbon externalities and curb carbon leakage, they may impose uneven compliance costs on firms with differing technological, financial, and institutional capacities. We therefore examine who bears the burden of “carbon fairness” within the emerging architecture of global carbon governance.
We analyse how BCAs and domestic carbon pricing regimes affect firms operating in hard-to-abate sectors, including steel, cement, oil and gas, and power generation. Primary data are collected through structured surveys and semi-structured interviews with firms, policymakers, and industry associations, capturing perceptions of regulatory fairness, competitiveness, and compliance burdens, as well as the adoption of AI-based tools for emissions monitoring and reporting.
We address three core questions: whether carbon pricing and BCAs distribute mitigation costs equitably across firms; how AI-enabled compliance technologies shape inclusion, transparency, and ethical participation; and whether global carbon governance mechanisms risk reinforcing structural disadvantages for firms in African economies. By grounding ethical debates in firm-level evidence, the research generates new insights into the distributive and moral dimensions of carbon regulation.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how SMEs in the Global South navigate digital, institutional, and financial barriers to comply with the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. The paper will be highlighting agency, inequality, and justice implications in global carbon governance.
Paper long abstract
The EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) aims to prevent carbon leakage by requiring imports to comply with carbon pricing standards. While designed to enhance carbon accountability, CBAM presents significant challenges for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) in the Global South, which face digital, institutional, and financial barriers to compliance. Limited access to monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) systems, weak domestic carbon governance, and constrained green finance exacerbate the difficulty of meeting EU standards.
This proposed paper investigates how SMEs navigate these barriers, focusing on their adaptive strategies, including reliance on intermediaries, proxy reporting, process adjustments, and selective participation in export markets. Drawing on political economy and global value chain perspectives, the research examines the interplay between SME agency, structural constraints, and inclusion in global carbon governance. Case studies and secondary data from Africa, Asia, and Latin America will be analyzed to identify patterns of compliance adaptation and the resulting justice and equity implications.
The study anticipates that CBAM, while promoting environmental accountability, may unintentionally create procedural exclusion and uneven burden-sharing among smaller producers. By documenting SME experiences and adaptive responses, the research aims to provide policy-relevant insights, including technical assistance, digital MRV support, and access to climate finance, that enhance SME agency and reduce inequities.
The paper contributes to debates on power, agency, and justice in emerging carbon governance frameworks and offers guidance for designing inclusive policies that support both climate goals and equitable market participation.
Paper short abstract
Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanisms reshape African development pathways. Using World Development Indicators, this study explains cross-country variation in carbon-border trade vulnerability by energy intensity, manufacturing reliance, export concentration, income levels, and state capacity.
Paper long abstract
Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanisms (CBAM) are reconfiguring global trade and climate governance, with disproportionate implications for African economies embedded in carbon-intensive and undiversified export structures. While CBAM is framed as a climate fairness instrument, its developmental effects depend on structural conditions that shape countries’ exposure and adjustment capacity. This study examines CBAM from a geopolitics and development perspective, focusing on African economies as representative of tropical, late-industrialising contexts.
Using exclusively open-access data from the World Development Indicators (WDI), the paper explains cross-country variation in carbon-border trade vulnerability, defined as dependence on emissions-intensive manufacturing and trade exposure relative to development capacity. The explanatory framework combines five core dimensions: energy intensity, manufacturing dependence, export concentration, income level, and state capacity. These indicators capture historically rooted development pathways rather than firm-level inefficiencies.
Situating the analysis within international political economy, the paper argues that CBAM acts as an external constraint on policy space, redistributing adjustment costs toward African economies with limited fiscal, technological, and institutional buffers. The findings highlight how carbon borders risk reinforcing structural asymmetries in global trade unless accompanied by compensatory finance, technology transfer, and data infrastructure support. By grounding the analysis in widely used development indicators, the study provides a transparent and scalable framework for assessing the justice implications of global carbon governance for Africa’s low-carbon transition.
Paper short abstract
This panel examines how geopolitical fragmentation is reshaping mobility, logistics, and infrastructure across the Global South. It highlights how Southern actors navigate shifting power relations, sustainability agendas, and emerging forms of agency amid global uncertainty.
Paper long abstract
Geopolitical fragmentation is transforming the material and political landscapes of mobility and infrastructure across the Global South. As global power relations fracture through conflicts, sanctions, supply-chain reconfigurations, and competing visions of “green” connectivity, the very foundations of sustainable mobility are being redrawn. This panel examines how these global shifts are reshaping infrastructures of movement, the governance of logistics, and the agency of Southern actors in navigating uncertain development futures.
Sustainable mobility and logistics have long been framed as pathways toward inclusive, low-carbon growth. Yet in an era of competing trade blocs, contested digital standards, and fragmented climate regimes, transport and infrastructure projects increasingly reflect geopolitical realignments rather than shared sustainability goals. From China’s Belt and Road corridors to Western “green infrastructure” initiatives, the Global South has become a terrain of infrastructural rivalry, strategic dependencies, and new forms of agency.
We invite contributions that interrogate how states, cities, and communities in Africa, Asia, and Latin America reinterpret mobility and connectivity amid global uncertainty. How do local actors leverage fragmentation to assert autonomy or resilience? What new geographies of logistics, energy transition, and trade are emerging from these tensions?
By foregrounding the agency of Southern actors within fractured global systems, this panel reimagines development as a plural, contested, and uncertain process, one that is being actively reshaped through the politics of mobility and infrastructure.