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This survey highlights how the Asia-Pacific region sits at the geographic and political epicenter of competing futures for low-carbon development. Long histories of colonial extraction, structural dependency, and development finance governed by creditor priorities have left many countries and territories with limited fiscal policy space and enduring inequalities. With the global green transition now intensifying demand for minerals, industrial capacity, and grid infrastructure, the region has become a primary arena where new forms of extraction—extraction marketed as “sustainable”—risk reproducing older injustices under a greener rhetoric. Foreign state-backed capital, multinational commodity chains, and domestic state-led industrialization together create transition frontiers that too often prioritize supply-chain timelines and geopolitical security over community welfare, land rights, and ecological integrity.
In response, a broad and increasingly coordinated political movement led from the Global South is advancing a reparative vision of transition. This movement combines demands that are practical (debt relief, grant-based climate finance, locally controlled value-capture) with moral and juridical claims (reparation for historical emissions and colonial expropriation, recognition of differentiated responsibility).21 Over the past two years these demands have moved into the institutional sphere as well as onto the streets: regional coalitions such as the Pan-African Climate Justice Alliance and allied Global South networks have launched campaigns linking debt cancellation, reparations, and just transition agendas; mass mobilizations and coordinated protests have targeted the IMF and World Bank meetings; and civil society calls for a binding, multilateral debt-restructuring mechanism have grown louder. These developments underline that reparations are not merely rhetorical: they are being operationalized as demands for concrete shifts in financing architecture and conditionality.
Institutional shifts have been uneven but meaningful. The creation and operationalization of international loss-and-damage financing mechanisms represents a partial institutional acknowledgment that vulnerable countries and territories require new flows that do not replicate debt dependencies. Yet advocates emphasize that loss-and-damage alone is not reparations; it must sit alongside grant-based adaptation finance, debt relief, and broader structural reforms that dismantle the financial subordination of low-income states. Parallel campaigns pressed on the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and G20—demanding not only more money but changes to modalities: fewer loans, more grants, debt swaps for climate and biodiversity, and transparency and participation in debt workouts. Evidence that debt servicing now eclipses climate finance in many low-income countries and territories has sharpened critique of the prevailing orthodoxies of conditional lending and austerity.
At the same time, geopolitical competition for critical minerals and industrial capacity is restructuring the region’s political economy. State-backed investments, strategic stockpiling, and “de-risking” policies by high-income states are accelerating extraction, refining and processing projects across the Asia-Pacific.22 This re-embedding of state power in mineral chains has two contradictory consequences: it can create opportunities for regional industrialization and value-capture, but it also deepens the scale and speed of interventions that threaten to dispossess communities and externalize environmental and social costs. Critically, the militarization or securitization of mineral supply chains–where access and reliability trump distributive justice–can lock countries and territories into extractive boom-and-bust dynamics rather than durable, diversified development.
These converging dynamics—debt dependence, the geopolitics of minerals, and nascent reparations politics—and the findings from this survey yield three central takeaways for policy and research in the Asia-Pacific.
Reparations as structural reform, not charity: Movements’ insistence on reparations reframes the problem from one of “aid” to one of liability and structural redistribution. This reframing requires policymakers to move beyond ad hoc funding windows toward mechanisms that reduce debt burdens (debt cancellation, debt-for-climate swaps), expand grant finance, and institutionalize participation rights for affected communities in financing decisions. Guided by movement demands, reparations should aim to restore fiscal sovereignty and create fiscal space for public investment in social and green infrastructures.
Prioritize local value-capture and governance over raw extraction. For transitions to be just, policies must emphasize onshore processing, technology transfer, and community benefit sharing rather than simply becoming mineral exporters for foreign value chains. This requires enforceable local content rules, transparent contracts, stronger land and FPIC (Free, Prior, and Informed Consent) protections, and regional industrial strategies that resist capture by narrow geopolitical bargains. Development finance institutions need to reorient from loan-driven models toward catalytic equity and grant instruments that support local capacities and environmental safeguards.
Link climate finance to debt and governance reform. Operationalizing reparative finance entails coupling climate funding with debt relief and governance reforms that prevent future subordination. Examples include debt-for-climate swaps, restructuring that limits debt service to sustainable thresholds, and creditor frameworks that make private bondholders share adjustment costs. At the multilateral level, progress will require greater representation of Global South priorities in IMF/World Bank governance and new international instruments (e.g., a UN debt convention or a formal loss-and-damage replenishment mechanism) that institutionalize responsibility and transparent dispute resolution.
Finally, the ethical and political demands of climate reparations create a test for solidarity politics in the region. If reparations are to be more than symbolic, they must transform the legal-financial architecture that reproduces extraction and dependence. That requires not only technical redesigns of finance but also political alliances—between labor movements, Indigenous communities, anti-debt coalitions and transformative policies—that can translate global moral claims into enforceable policy and institutional changes. Asia-Pacific’s position at the intersection of critical minerals, state capital, and vibrant social movements makes it both especially vulnerable and especially consequential: how the region negotiates reparative demands will materially shape whether the energy transition becomes a vehicle of restitution and democratic development, or reiterates the long history of extractive inequity.
As the Just Transition framework and other frameworks for reparative climate action proliferate among major international organizations and institutions based in the Global North, there is the risk that these frameworks and the multiple principles, processes, and practices that foster just transitions will be stripped of their transformative power and the insights and imperatives outlined above. It is thus imperative that as their collaboration with and support of Asia-Pacific climate, agri-food, and environmental organizations continues and grows, Global North countries, organizations, and institutions persistently take seriously and uplift the multifaceted efforts towards reparative just transitions, beginning with their role in the crisis, and in service of just transitions globally.
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- 21Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Reconsidering Reparations: Why Climate Justice and Constructive Politics Are Needed in the Wake of Slavery and Colonialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022).
- 22Transnational Institute, State of Power 2025: Geopolitics of Capitalism (Amsterdam: Transnational Institute, 2025), https://www.tni.org/en/publication/geopolitics-of-capitalism.
