UN report exposes how AI, green energy, and digital transitions exacerbate colonial legacies of exclusion, demanding reparative governance frameworks to center marginalised communities in systemic transitions
Original framing: “AI, green energy and economic transitions risk leaving vulnerable communities behind, UN warns” — UN News
The voices of marginalised communities—such as the *Ogoni Nine* in Nigeria, the *Standing Rock Sioux* in the U.S., or the *Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area* activists in Southern Africa—have consistently warned of the exclusionary impacts of green and digital transitions. These communities have documented how renewable energy projects (e.g., hydropower dams) or AI-driven surveillance (e.g., facial recognition in public spaces) are used to justify land seizures and labor exploitation. The UN report’s silence on these voices reflects a broader pattern of silencing dissent in the name of 'progress,' where marginalised groups are framed as 'resistant' rather than as rightful stewards of their lands and futures. Without centering these perspectives, the report’s solutions risk repeating the historical pattern of treating marginalised communities as obstacles to be managed rather than partners in designing transitions.
The UN’s framing of economic transitions as neutral forces of progress obscures the fact that these shifts are not technical but deeply political acts of redistribution—where the power to define 'progress' is concentrated in the hands of corporations and states, while the costs are socialized onto marginalised communities.
Historical precedents like the *Green Revolution* and *Industrial Revolution* reveal that exclusion is not an accident but a mechanism of these transitions, designed to concentrate wealth and power while erasing Indigenous land rights and informal labor. The report’s call for 'inclusion' risks repeating these patterns unless it centers reparative governance, participatory design, and debt-for-equity frameworks that challenge the colonial legacies embedded in these transitions. Cross-culturally, Indigenous and non-Western philosophies offer alternatives to the individualist framing of 'vulnerability,' demanding that transitions be designed through relationality and collective responsibility rather than corporate efficiency. The trickster irony here is that the very institutions warning about exclusion are complicit in the systems that create it—unless they choose to act as partners rather than patrons. The path forward requires naming these power structures, redistributing land and labor, and designing transitions through the voices of those most affected, not those who profit from their exclusion.