Third World Approaches to International Law emerged as an intellectual and political movement driven by scholars from the Global South who sought to expose the colonial foundations of international law. TWAIL scholarship demonstrates how the legal structures that shape global governance, trade regulations, property regimes, sovereignty doctrines, were historically crafted to legitimize and operationalize colonial domination [1]. These structures survive today in more subtle forms, shaping the practice of extractivism, or neo-extractivism, across the Global South.
The same legal system that claims to promote global cooperation and sustainable development is also responsible for organizing global hierarchies of power, determining which territories become sacrifice zones and which become space of wealth extracted elsewhere. Contemporary extractivism, whether through mining, large scale agriculture or the commodification of carbon, operates within patterns established during centuries of colonial rule [2]. The methodology used by TWAIL exposes these continuities and invites us to question whether international law, as currently constituted, can genuinely transform these patterns or whether it continues to reproduce them.
From this perspective, the central aim of this text is to explore the TWAIL’s view of contemporary extractivism as a continuation of coloniality within the international system and what pathways it may offer toward a decolonial ecology. Ultimately, we must ask whether international law can provide tools to overcome extractivism and meaningfully protect nature or whether its colonial structure fundamentally constrains its transformative power.
Colonial origins of international law and its influence on the relation between nature and society
The emergence of modern international law is inseparable from the rise of the modern state and the consolidation of a global capitalist market. These processes developed through the conquest and appropriation of territories, peoples, and ecosystems across the Global South. The legal doctrines that justified European expansion, such as sovereignty, enabled the expropriation of lands and defined nature as a resource available for exploitation [3].
TWAIL scholars emphasize that these doctrines were neither accidental nor neutral: they constituted the legal foundation of the global economy, establishing an extractive relationship between Europe and the rest of the world [4]. This relationship has not disappeared. Instead, it has been institutionalized through the international organizations created in the post world war II era, including the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and later the World Trade Organization. These institutions promote policies of development that reproduce Eurocentric models of growth, productivity, and environmental management.
Programs labeled as sustainable development frequently reinforce extractivist dynamics rather than challenge them. Structural adjustment programs, investment treaties, and trade agreements often enable multinational corporations to access natural resources while limiting the regulatory capacity of states in the Global South. Environmental protection measures promoted by these institutions are typically subordinated to economic priorities, framing nature as an asset to be managed, conserved, or offset, not as a subject of rights or as part of a relational world inhabited by peoples [5].
Contemporary extractivism thus extends beyond the physical removal of minerals, timber, or oil. It refers to a mode of relating to territories that treats them as zones of exploitation, externalizing environmental and social costs onto marginalized communities. This logic has now found new life in the discourse of sustainability and the green transition. Lithium extraction for electric vehicles, large-scale wind farms on traditional lands and carbon offset markets that restrict traditional land uses exemplify what scholars increasingly describe as “green colonialism.” These initiatives reproduce colonial patterns: environmental burdens are placed on the Global South, while ecological benefits are consumed in the Global North [6].
This dynamic is particularly visible in the architecture of contemporary climate governance. For example, mechanisms of international cooperation established under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement [7] create forms of international cooperation that allow the transfer of emission reductions between states. While designed, hopefully, to facilitate global mitigation efforts, these instruments may enable carbon offset projects in the Global South and, therefore, allow continued emissions in the Global North. In this context, mitigation efforts may be geographically displaced, while local communities face restrictions on land use and resource management. The commodification of carbon, therefore, makes it possible to reproduce colonial patterns of resource appropriation in the name of climate change mitigation. In other words, it makes it possible for the Global North to remain hegemonic.
Switzerland, for instance, has concluded agreements with several countries in the Global South, including Ghana [8], to finance mitigation projects whose emission reductions can be transferred and counted toward Switzerland’s national climate targets. In practice, emission reductions generated in Ghana through projects such as renewable energy initiatives may be credited to Switzerland’s own climate commitments. While presented as a form of international cooperation that supports sustainable development, such arrangements risk geographically displacing mitigation efforts, allowing the Global North to meet domestic climate obligations through projects implemented abroad, thereby reinforcing existing asymmetries in the world.
Within this context, international law often serves to legitimize and stabilize extractive arrangements, even when framed through the language of environmental protection or climate change mitigation.
Decolonial ecology and international law
Debates surrounding the Anthropocene and planetary ecological collapse are frequently dominated by European perspectives that present climate change as a universal human problem, obscuring the historical role of colonialism and capitalism in producing environmental degradation. TWAIL rejects this narrative, insisting that any discussion about global environmental governance must account for the colonial origins of ecological crisis and the unequal burdens it imposes on the Global South [9].
A truly global conception of environmental justice therefore requires more than policy reform. It must confront the historical responsibility of the Global North for environmental destruction and unequal resource extraction. This includes recognition of ecological and climate debts arising from centuries of exploitation – debts that have accumulated through pollution-intensive industrialization, land appropriation, carbon emissions, and the outsourcing of environmental harm.
From a decolonial ecological perspective, international law must confront three central demands. The first one requires to rethink environmental justice as historical justice. Solutions to ecological crises cannot be disconnected from histories of dispossession. Reparative measures, financial, territorial, and institutional, are required to address the structural roots of inequality.
The second one involves the recognition of colonized and marginalized peoples as central subjects in the ecological transition. Indigenous communities, Afro-descendant peoples, and other groups who have historically defended and sustained ecosystems must be recognized not merely as stakeholders but as bearers of distinct epistemologies and legal orders that challenge western frameworks of property and environmental management.
The third one addresses forms of reparation and reconciliation with the Earth and among peoples. Decolonial ecology treats environmental protection as an ethical and political project rooted in reciprocity, responsibility, and relationality. This vision goes beyond technocratic solutions, calling for a transformation of humanity’s relationship with nature that draws from non-Western cosmologies and forms of knowledge [10].
As an example of a normative opening, that, in a way, engages with this perspective, there are the legal developments actually recognizing the rights of nature. Constitutional reforms in Ecuador, that, for instance, recognized Buen Vivir and as a fundamental right [11], and the landmark decision by the Colombian Constitutional Court that recognized Atrato River as a legal subject that needed protection [12] challenge the anthropocentric and classical approaches to environmental law. These developments draw from indigenous cosmologies and relational conceptions of nature, suggesting that alternative legal imaginaries, that embrace somehow decolonial ecology, are gradually entering formal legal systems.
TWAIL’s contribution is crucial here: it exposes the limits of international law’s current architecture and opens space to imagine alternative legal and political arrangements. These alternatives may include the recognition of rights of nature, plural legal orders and mechanisms of restitution for environmental harm. While international law has incorporated some of these ideas at the margins, they remain constrained by the system’s foundational commitment to sovereignty, development and capitalist extraction.
Conclusion
Analyzing the role of international law in environmental protection from a Global South perspective reveals a profound tension. On one hand, international law articulates principles of sustainability, conservation and climate responsibility. On the other, its colonial origins and embedded economic priorities undermine its ability to challenge the extractivist model that continues to structure global relations.
TWAIL scholarship demonstrates that contemporary environmental degradation and extractivism are not anomalies but continuations of the colonial logic that shaped international law. The institutions, norms and economic frameworks that organize the global system still privilege the interests of the Global North while placing ecological burdens on the Global South. Without confronting this legacy, international law’s capacity for transformation remains limited.
A decolonial ecology – rooted in historical justice, recognition of indigenous and marginalized communities, and genuine ecological reparation – offers pathways for reimagining the role of law in environmental protection. It invites us to move beyond conservation as resource management, toward a relational and ethical engagement with the Earth. We can see a slight tendency towards that when analysing the rights of nature, granted by the Constitutional Court of Colombia and elevated by the Constitution of Bolivia to constitutional status. These developments, however, represent only limited manifestations of the broader transformative vision proposed by decolonial ecology.
Ultimately, the question is not simply whether international law can protect nature, but whether it can be reshaped to dismantle the colonial structures that undermine ecological justice. TWAIL offers critical tools for this task by revealing the roots of global inequality and pointing toward alternative futures grounded in decolonial imagination and ecological responsibility.
References
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[7] United Nations. Paris Agreement. Paris, 12 December 2015, entered into force 4 November 2016.
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