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It is what Will Steffen and his colleagues have called the Great Acceleration [1]<\/a>1 \u2014 Steffen, W. et al. (2015) The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration. The Anthropocene Review. 2 (1): 81\u201398.\n<\/span><\/span>. A truly meteoric increase in the (over-)use of the basic materials that make human life possible on the planet, and all the associated pollutant and destructive effects. These materials, for example, oil, were extracted from countries in the geopolitical South or peripheral countries, but were mainly consumed in the major centres of the capitalist world-system. The new rules of the world economy established profoundly unequal terms of trade, from both the ecological and economic viewpoints, as the dependency theorists pointed out. In terms of social welfare, this accelerated economic growth in the capitalist centres had very disparate results in different parts of the world. It has pushed us towards outrageous levels of inequality. Today, we can say that economic growth is the main driver of both environmental destruction and social inequality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Until now, the perception of development that associates it closely with economic growth, expressed in terms of gross domestic product, continues to be hegemonic \u2013 despite the acute environmental crisis that is currently unfolding around us and the multiple attempts to redefine development (human development, sustainable development, etc.). The international financial institutions have not changed their perspective on this and neither have they lost power. Even the Sustainable Development Goals include a goal focused on growth \u2013 a paradoxical goal considering that we inhabit a limited space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Today, we can say that economic growth is the main driver of both environmental destruction and social inequality<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n For many rural communities in Asia, Africa and Latin America, development today is the slogan that justifies their displacement, their uprooting, the loss not only of their livelihoods, but also the loss of their social, environmental and spiritual relations. In their experience, development is any type of mega-project that serves distant, abstract ends and leaves them with nothing but dispossession, impoverishment and violence.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Development cooperation is one dimension of the larger development paradigm. It is a specific form of relationship between geopolitical Norths and Souths that was born in the development era. The rationale of the development\/underdevelopment binomial and the vision of the world it builds started to be questioned in the 1990s. It was the decade when the environmental justice movement was born, when migrant or black women began to question white and middle- or upper-class feminisms from a different place of enunciation, and when in Latin America, An\u00edbal Quijano and the modernity\/coloniality group formulated their theses about the unbroken persistence of the coloniality of power and knowledge, more than a century after the end of colonialism as a historical epoch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As the deprofessionalised Mexican intellectual Gustavo Esteva points out, classifying and labelling very diverse societies \u2013 which had their own ways of organising the production of goods and exchanges, and their own cultural and wellbeing horizons \u2013 as poor and underdeveloped, applying the lens of capitalist economics as the only parameter, implied by its very nature a considerable burden of epistemic violence. The euphemism \u201cdeveloping\u201d invented later on does not in itself disarm this binary and hierarchical conception of the world. As Esteva says: \u201cUnderdevelopment began on 20 January 1949. On that day, two billion people became underdeveloped. In fact, from that time onwards, they ceased to be what they were, in all their diversity, and became an inverted mirror of other people\u2019s reality: a mirror that despises them and sends them to the back of the queue, a mirror that reduces the definition of their identity, that of a heterogeneous and diverse majority, to the terms of a small and homogenising minority\u201d [2]<\/a>2 \u2014 Esteva, G. (1996) “Desarrollo” en Sachs, W. (ed.) Diccionario del desarrollo. Una gu\u00eda del conocimiento como poder. Lima: PRATEC.\n<\/span><\/span>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The exclusion of local rural knowledge to give priority to expert modern knowledge and the application of standardised \u201ctoolboxes\u201d considered universal to all kinds of very diverse socio-historical contexts are some of the forms that this epistemic violence took.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For decades, we have scorned the knowledge of country people, indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants, artisanal fishermen, and people who live from and with the forest in different parts of the planet. As we know today, these populations have the merit of having preserved 80% of the biodiversity we still have [3]<\/a>3 \u2014 Garnett, S., Burgess, N. (2018) A spatial overview of the global importance of Indigenous lands for conservation. Nature Sustainability 1(7): 369-374 [Available online].\n<\/span><\/span>. We insist on calling these groups poor just because monetary income is not central to their way of life. Or backward, because they do not share the goals of growthism, of infinite linear progress. They uphold other values, such as balance with the environment, or the quality of relationships, not only with other humans, but also with other species and with nature in general, which they see as the source of life. It is they who are practitioners of different forms of sumak kawsay<\/em>, life in plenitude, translated as good living by Latin American progressivism. Each group in its own way, as dictated by its context, its historical trajectory and the biophysical conditions of the place it inhabits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is these groups that, classically, appear as the poorest in population censuses and thus become a target for development cooperation. A process which, according to the economic anthropologist Jason Hickel in his macroanalysis of money flows, benefits the donor countries much more than the countries receiving this \u201caid\u201d. According to Hickel<\/a>, \u201ceach year, two trillion dollars flow from the global North to the South, in development aid, loans and foreign investments. But actually, five trillion dollars flow back in the opposite direction, from the global South to the North. That means that the North takes a net total of three trillion dollars from the South every year. That is 24 times the aid budget that the South receives. That\u2019s a huge transfer of wealth from the poor countries to the rich countries\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The North takes a net total of three trillion dollars from the South every year, 24 times the aid budget that the South receives<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n According to Hickel, this is happening thanks to several mechanisms: first, tax evasion and illicit transfers of funds involving large transnational corporations, as well as interest payments on debts whose value has already been paid many times over. Second, the rules of international trade, designed to benefit rich countries by allowing them to extract resources and labour from countries in the South at artificially low prices. According to these calculations, the countries of the South contribute most of the labour and raw materials to global production. But at the same time, the poorest 60% of the world\u2019s population receives only 5% of the new income generated each year by economic growth. The rest goes directly to those who are already rich.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n There is a long history of unequal exchanges between Latin America and the different regions of the North. Latin America is also currently the region with the highest net exports of materials per capita in the world, along with Central Asia. Since the 1970s, material extraction in Latin America has increased fourfold, a growth rate that is much higher than the global average. The recent level of extraction has reached unprecedented levels: it is possible that in the last four decades, more materials have been extracted from Latin America for export than in the entire previous history of the region. At the same time, most Latin American economies import at a higher price than they export. In other words, they are decapitalised in material terms, without this necessarily generating positive economic returns. This reaffirms the thesis of ecologically and economically unequal exchange [4]<\/a>4 \u2014 Infante Amate, J., Urrego Mesa, A. et al. (2020) “Las venas abiertas de Am\u00e9rica Latina en la era del Antropoceno: Un estudio biof\u00edscio del comercio exterior (1900-2016)”. Di\u00e1logos Revista Electr\u00f3nica de Historia, 21(2): 177-214.\n<\/span><\/span>. Obviously, there is no development cooperation capable of reversing these dominant trends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This critical look at the functionality of the concept of development for unjust international relations does not mean that there have not also been many very valuable development cooperation efforts, with truly emancipating consequences for the communities of the South, insofar as they had the opportunity to be actors and not \u201cbeneficiaries\u201d. Furthermore, cooperation was and is a field in dispute, in which individuals, groups and even institutions instituted radical changes and unconventional practices. However, cooperation, even at best, was never more than a band-aid in a long history of exploitation and plunder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The thesis that I would like to propose here is that both the development paradigm and cooperation are essentially 20th century phenomena. The challenges of the 21st century call for establishing North-South relations of a different kind, based on a radically different approach. This new approach is based, first, on the recognition that the world-system we have built historically is riddled with profound injustices, coloniality and racism, which persist to this day. And second, it is based on the fact that we are increasingly facing global problems that threaten humanity as a whole, in the context of a multidimensional, civilisational crisis: climate change, loss of biodiversity and extreme inequality are just some of its manifestations. The COVID-19 pandemic has painfully shown us just how crucial it is to design truly global solutions to global challenges that do not reinforce pre-existing structural asymmetries, rather than simply responding with a sum of very disparate and unequal national strategies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This new approach is based on the recognition that the world-system we have built historically is riddled with profound injustices, coloniality and racism<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Our understanding of the challenges facing human societies today is more detailed than ever. We can accurately model the future of the world\u2019s climate. We know that at least a hundred times more species are currently becoming extinct than would be expected from natural processes. Especially in the tropics of Latin America and the Caribbean, where, according to WWF<\/a>, populations of fish, reptiles and amphibians, mammals and birds fell by an average of 94 per cent between 1970 and 2016. Paradoxically, in contrast to this level of knowledge, we find it very difficult to develop life-sustaining responses to these problems.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n The hegemonic actors reacted to global warming with a change in discourse: they put decarbonisation on the agenda. In December 2019, the European Union launched its Green Pact, which aims to achieve \u201cnet zero\u201d greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and boost economic growth by transitioning the technology base of infrastructures and production towards renewable energy sources [5]<\/a>5 \u2014 European Commission. (2019). Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the European Council, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions. [Available online].\n<\/span><\/span>. The document advocates \u201cgreen\u201d economic growth, supposedly decoupled from resource use and pressure on ecosystems, which would be made possible by the digitisation of a large part of the economy (although all digitisation obviously requires raw materials and a considerable amount of energy). The United States also wants to eliminate \u201cnet\u201d CO2 emissions from its economy by 2050 and halve them by 2030. China, for its part, aims to reach peak emissions by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this dominant scenario of ecological modernisation, the European Union is advocating \u201cgreen\u201d alliances with countries of the South to ensure the flow of resources it needs to transform its economy. Implicitly, these strategies assign four roles to regions such as Latin America. Each one contains a strong dimension of appropriation and imposition of foreign interests in their territories:<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe coloniality of development cooperation<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
Latin America: the world\u2019s materials warehouse<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
In the 21st century, we need a different paradigm to guide North-South relations<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
The European Union\u2019s \u201cgreen\u201d economic growth<\/h5>\n\n\n\n