Green imperialism, sovereignty, and the quest for national development in the Congo Translated title: Impérialisme vert, souveraineté et quête de développement national au Congo Translated title: Imperialismo verde, soberania e busca do desenvolvimento nacional no Congo

ABSTRACT

This article deploys the term ‘green imperialism’ to denote the specificities of contemporary imperialism within the context of the hoped-for global transition towards low-carbon capitalist economies and societies in the coming decades. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) provides a modern exemplar of green imperialist dynamics in action. Hegemonic powers are seeking to position the Congolese economy as an exporter of low-cost, low-carbon metals and an open market for the entry of renewable energy finance and technologies. To date, the political response to green imperialism in the DRC has reproduced a model of mining-led national development that historically has delivered little by way of material improvements for most of the population, thus undermining the prospects of prosperity in the country. Albeit this time around there is the possibility of expanded access for some to renewable forms of energy as a foreign-owned private commodity, with all the limitations and contradictions this new model of energy delivery entails.

RÉSUMÉ

Dans cet article, le terme « impérialisme vert » est utilisé pour désigner les spécificités de l’impérialisme contemporain dans le contexte de la transition mondiale espérée vers des économies et des sociétés capitalistes à faible émission de carbone dans les décennies à venir. La République démocratique du Congo (RDC) est un exemple moderne de dynamique impérialiste verte en action, les puissances hégémoniques cherchant à positionner l’économie congolaise en tant qu’exportateur de métaux à faible coût et à faible teneur en carbone et en tant que marché ouvert à l’entrée des financements et des technologies d’énergie renouvelable. La réponse politique à l’impérialisme vert en RDC reproduit un modèle de développement national basé sur l’exploitation minière qui, historiquement, n’a apporté que peu d’améliorations matérielles à la plupart des Congolais, sapant ainsi les perspectives de prospérité dans le pays. Cependant, cette fois-ci, il s’agit d’un modèle avec la possibilité d’un accès élargi pour certains aux formes d’énergie renouvelable en tant que marchandise privée détenue par des étrangers, avec toutes les limitations et contradictions que ce nouveau modèle de fourniture d’énergie implique.

RESUMO

Neste artigo, o termo ‘imperialismo verde’ é utilizado para denotar as especificidades do imperialismo contemporâneo no contexto da esperada transição global para economias e sociedades capitalistas de baixo carbono nas próximas décadas. A República Democrática do Congo (RDC) fornece um exemplo moderno da dinâmica imperialista verde em ação, com potências hegemónicas procurando posicionar a economia congolesa como exportadora de metais de baixo custo e baixo carbono e como um mercado aberto para a entrada de financiamento e tecnologias de energia renovável. A resposta política ao imperialismo verde na RDC está a reproduzir um modelo de desenvolvimento nacional liderado pela mineração que, historicamente, pouco tem proporcionado em termos de melhorias materiais para a maioria dos congoleses, minando assim as perspetivas de prosperidade no país. Ainda que desta vez com a possibilidade de acesso alargado de alguns a formas renováveis de energia como mercadoria privada de propriedade estrangeira, e todas as limitações e contradições que este novo modelo de fornecimento de energia implica.

Main article text

Introduction

Nearly five years ago, in January 2019, Felix Tshisekedi – son of veteran opposition leader Etienne Tshisekedi – was inaugurated as the fifth President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Later that year, the United States (US) and the European Union (EU) unveiled their Green New Deals, looking to reinvigorate stagnating capitalist economies by catalysing massive growth in the manufacturing of renewable energy and other green technologies, creating millions of high-skilled and well-remunerated jobs in the process. Max Ajl (2021, 77) has labelled these low-carbon capitalist visions as belonging to a form of social democracy which as a historical form of capitalism has only survived through its ability to ‘hunt and feed on the periphery’. In other words, as an imperialist project dependent upon the transfer of value from South to North, producing uneven development and demanding Southern subordination within the global capitalist economy.

Writing in this journal on the changing forms of twenty-first century imperialism, Jayati Ghosh (2021, 10) noted:

A major feature of our times is the privatisation of much of what were, until recently, generally accepted as basic responsibilities of public provision. Basic amenities like electricity, water and transportation infrastructure, and social services like health, sanitation and education all fall into this category … the fact that provision is no longer necessarily in the public domain, and that private provision is increasingly seen as the norm, has opened up huge new markets for potentially profit-making activity … This is a more complicated expression of the imperialistic drive for control over economic territory than the direct annexation of geographic territory, but that does not make it any less consequential.

In this context, this article deploys the term ‘green imperialism’ to denote the ways in which large capital and hegemonic powers seek to control and generate profit from economic territory outside their national borders under the discursive banner of ‘greening’ the global economy (irrespective of how green or otherwise this process might be).¹ This takes place through the long-established extraction of cheap primary commodities located in the global South and required for the manufacture of renewable energy and other clean technologies, in the form of critical transition metals and minerals (Bainton et al. 2021), alongside the more contemporary ‘new frontiers of electricity capital’ (Baker 2023) seeking to profit from the expansion of renewable energy across the global South itself. Green imperialism, then, points to the specificities of contemporary imperialism within the context of the hoped-for global transition towards low-carbon capitalist economies and societies in the coming decades.

The DRC provides a modern exemplar of green imperialist dynamics in action. Hegemonic powers are seeking to position the Congolese economy as an exporter of low-cost, low-carbon metals and an open market for the entry of renewable energy finance and technologies. Copper, cobalt and lithium are three critical low-carbon metals due to their use in a range of green technologies in the energy and transport sectors, with cobalt a core element in electric batteries. The DRC has some of the world’s largest lithium deposits and in 2022 accounted for 10% of world copper production and 68% of world cobalt production. The country holds 48% of known world cobalt reserves (US Geological Survey 2023).

Alongside its strategic importance as a supplier of critical low-carbon metals, the DRC has an attractive domestic market for the rollout of renewable energy finance and technologies. With one of the lowest electricity access rates in the world, at around 16% of its approximately 90 million population (DRC Ministry of Energy 2017), and having recently liberalised its energy sector in 2014, the DRC holds considerable potential for foreign renewable energy firms and investors seeking profitable new markets. Hailed by British solar firm BBoxx (2021, 1) as ‘possibly the best pay-go solar market in the world’, the DRC hosts an estimated US$1 billion market for the deployment of mini-grid and off-grid solar technologies alone (African Development Bank 2017). The country is also home to 13% of global hydropower potential (African Development Bank 2020).

The line of argument developed in this article draws on and corroborates Atul Kohli’s recently proposed thesis on the relationship between imperialism, sovereignty and development, born out of his historical study into the drivers and effects of British imperialism in the nineteenth century and US imperialism in the twentieth century. Trained in US political science, Kohli’s (2020) latest book, Imperialism and the developing world: how Britain and the United States shaped the global periphery, nonetheless aligns with the tradition of Marxist scholarship on imperialism, dating back to Hobson (1902), Luxemburg (1951 [1913]), Lenin (2016 [1917]) and others, in positing the idea that capitalism is the main driver of imperialist expansion.

Kohli’s theory of imperialism is deployed here to help illuminate and structure an analysis of green imperialism in the DRC. The article’s focus on economic interests is not to deny the causal significance of other motivating factors, a critique that Apata (2022) has made of Kohli's contribution. In the case of renewable energy expansion, for example, cultural forms of imperialism operating within a neo-colonial civilising mission to ‘light a dark continent’, as The Economist put it back in 2014 (Simmet 2018), is surely an important driver. The ways in which different forms of imperialism work together and overlap are crucial to a complete understanding of the phenomenon, but such an analysis lies beyond the scope of this article.

The first component of Kohli’s thesis is that imperialism is motivated by the needs of hegemonic powers to enhance their national economic interests, which they achieve by undermining sovereignty in peripheral countries and establishing open economic access. In support of this thesis, the first section of the article documents how green imperialism in the DRC is predicated upon the dismantling of Congolese sovereign ownership and control over its natural resource wealth (not only low-carbon metals, but also water and sunlight) and establishing open access to the Congolese economy, so as to advance the green economic agendas of hegemonic powers.

The second component is that while national sovereignty is not sufficient to put a country on a path of progress, it is often a necessary precondition, and therefore the undermining of sovereignty imposed by imperialist powers simultaneously undermines the prospects of prosperity in countries at the global periphery. Here, and providing further support to Kohli’s thesis, the second section of the article demonstrates that the political response to green imperialism in the DRC, while offering some resistance, functions to reproduce a model of national development that historically has delivered little by way of material improvements for most of the population.

Green imperialism

While the origins of imperialist penetration in the DRC can be traced back to the Congo Free State (1885–1908) and the Belgian Congo (1908–1960), the process for maintaining open economic access to the country to further green imperialist agendas in the twenty-first century has more recent origins. Shortly after the official end of the Congo Wars (1996–2002), in July 2002, the DRC’s first new Mining Code since 1981 was passed. This was one of a raft of reforms drafted with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank’s close supervision as part of an overall effort to instil a neoliberal regime at the heart of the DRC post-war polity (Moshonas 2013), with Northern donors playing a supporting role (Marriage 2010).

Working ‘in close collaboration with a Congolese committee on the drafting of the mining law’ (Mazalto 2008, 58), the World Bank blamed the mining sector’s decline on ‘poor governance’ under the Zairian state (Rubbers 2010, 330), as opposed to the weight of external shocks in the form of the copper price collapse and oil price hike of the 1970s. Reform was then driven by the World Bank’s maxim that ‘Zaire must be less, but better governed’ (World Bank 1994, cited in Mazalto 2008, 57). Consequently, the 2002 Code moved to privatise state-owned mining enterprises and attract fresh foreign investment by offering a generously liberal tax and customs regime – one of the most liberal on the continent at the time (Marriage 2018) – including tax holidays and exemptions and low royalty rates. Much later, in 2015, the IMF DRC Head of Mission would comment that ‘the 2002 Mining Code is too generous, so much so that the state captures very little in the end’ (Lukusa 2016, 156). While the current Mining Code, passed in March 2018, has attempted to redress some of these neoliberal excesses (discussed in the next section), the overall model of ceding ownership and control of the mining sector to foreign corporations remains intact.

Between 2002 and 2021, foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows to the DRC increased from US$188 million to US$1.9 billion and FDI stocks rose from US$907 million to US$29.1 billion (Figure 1), or from 10% to 57% of GDP. Fresh foreign investment has been heavily focused on mining. From 2004 to 2022, the official annual exports of copper and cobalt increased more than 300-fold and 80-fold respectively, from 7689 tons to 2.4 million tons in the case of copper, and from 1412 tons to 115,371 tons for cobalt (DRC Ministry of Mines 2023). At the time of writing, the Manono lithium deposit, heralded as one of the world’s largest, is being developed under the majority ownership of the Australian mining company AVZ Minerals.

Figure 1.

FDI inflows and stock to the DRC, 2002 to 2021 (millions of current US$).

Source: UNCTADstat database.

A brief look at who controls the DRC’s cobalt production – the most critical of the country’s transition metals – makes clear the near-complete ceding of Congolese resource sovereignty to foreign mining corporates. In 2021, six transnational mining corporations held majority ownership of cobalt projects that accounted for 90% of production in the DRC, equating to more than half of the world supply for that year (Table 1). Of these six corporations, four are of Chinese nationality. The two others also export a share of their production to China. Glencore, for example, has agreements with Chinese battery manufacturers GEM and CATL.

Table 1.

Cobalt production in the DRC, 2021.

Firm	Nationality	Project(s)	Production
			Tons	%
Glencore	Swiss	Kamoto, Mutanda	27,700	30
Eurasian Resources Group	Kazakh	Metalkol	20,718	22
CMOC	Chinese	Tenke Fungurume	18,501	20
Pengxin International Mining	Chinese	Shituru	7000	8
Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt	Chinese	Luiswishi	5390	6
Jinchuan Group	Chinese	Ruashi	4400	5
Other	-	-	9302	10
Total			93,011	100

Sources: DRC Ministry of Mines statistics (2023), company reports.

With most Congolese cobalt exported to China and around 50% of global cobalt refining taking place in China (Bernards 2021, 549), US and EU efforts to weaken China's dominant position in the control of Congolese cobalt have stepped up considerably in recent years. In September 2022, the EU adopted its Critical Raw Materials Act, which makes explicit mention of the threat posed by Chinese dominance in the control of Congolese cobalt production and processing. Commissioner Thierry Breton marked the Act’s adoption by arguing that ‘[w]e need to be more assertive and less naïve in defending our economic interests’ (European Commission 2022).²

In July 2023, the Chairman of the US House Subcommittee on Africa, Representative John James of Michigan, introduced a bill demanding the creation of a US national strategy to secure supply chains involving critical minerals specifically from the DRC. The press release accompanying the bill’s introduction noted:

Currently, China operates 15 of the 19 cobalt producing mines in the DRC, which has created dominance for the Chinese Communist Party over global critical mineral supply chains which directly harms US strategic interests. As a result of this supply chain reality … it is imperative that the United States increases its engagement in the country. (James 2023; emphasis added)

This was followed shortly after, in October 2023, by the announcement of a five-year deal under which, from 2026, the Kazakh firm Eurasian Resources Group will sell 3000 tons of its Congolese cobalt hydroxide a year to US-based battery materials processor EVelution Energy, in a significant boost to US cobalt processing and electric vehicle battery manufacturing capacity. Just a few weeks later, the US and the EU unveiled their joint plans to finance the construction of a strategic transport corridor connecting the DRC’s cobalt and other mineral exports with the Atlantic Ocean via the Port of Lobito in Angola (Valero 2023). The colonial echoes and historical continuities are all too clear, with the US and the EU wanting to press the DRC into the role of providing low-cost, unprocessed cobalt and other transition metals in support of their own green industrialisation and job creation strategies domestically.

As with mining, the process to dismantle the nationalised Congolese energy sector, a sector which since the 1970s had been led by Société Nationale d’Électricité (SNEL), began in the 2000s shortly after the DRC had emerged from the Congo Wars. In June 2008, the EU Energy Initiative contracted Mercados Energy Markets International, based in Madrid, to develop a new energy policy for the DRC based on the principles of ‘electricity sector liberalisation … [and] the creation of an attractive economic climate for investments’ (EU Energy Initiative 2008, 2). The country’s resultant electricity liberalisation law, introduced in June 2014, adhered closely to these principles. Article 1 declared the liberalisation of the sector in a shift towards public–private partnerships, and Article 80 guaranteed that any private investor can be the owner of an independent electricity project.³

Three years later, in 2017, the World Bank approved the US$147 million, seven-year DRC Electricity Access & Services Expansion project. Alongside upgrading and expanding access in SNEL service areas, the project aims to promote private sector access expansion by providing debt and grant support to renewable projects, and by strengthening the implementation of key provisions of the 2014 liberalisation law seen as critical for expanding private sector participation (World Bank 2023a). This was followed, in 2022, by a US$939 million, eight-year World Bank governance and reform project for energy and water. The two largest components of the project, together accounting for US$819 million of its total (or 87%), are ‘private sector-based access expansion’ at US$579 million and ‘public sector-based access expansion with private sector involvement’ at US$240 million (World Bank 2022, 13; World Bank 2023b).

While for the World Bank (2020, 2), more can still be done by way of tax breaks and subsidies to attract foreign energy investors to the DRC, investment has nonetheless been forthcoming. In hydro, the focus has been on generating export revenue through the development of Inga III on the Congo River, which at an estimated 40 gigawatts capacity has the potential to become the world’s largest hydropower plant. Requiring US$14 billion of investment, current investors include the Chinese state-owned China Three Gorges Corporation, the Australian group Fortescue Metals Group, and German investors (Malu-Malu 2020). While Inga III has been subject to much institutional inertia and delay (Congo Research Group and Resource Matters 2019), solar has seen considerably more movement. The solar projects signed during the first term of the Tshisekedi administration are summarised in Table 2, the largest of which is the planned construction of a 600-megawatt solar photovoltaic plant in Kinshasa, through an anticipated US$1 billion investment from US transnational The Sandi Group. Here, in contrast to China’s hold on cobalt production, Northern firms and finance predominate, reflecting the dominant role North American and European firms have played in solar expansion across Africa over the last decade (Cross and Neumark 2022).

Table 2.

Solar projects in the DRC, 2019–2023.

Year	Major firm	Nationality	Project
2019	CAT Projects	Australian	US$52 million plant in Kisangani
2020	Bboxx	British	Solar home systems to 10 million people by 2024
2020	Sandi Group	US	US$1 billion, 600MW plant in Kinshasa
2021	Gridworks	British	US$100 million solar-hybrid plants to 500,000 people
2021	Green Power Capital	US	US$300 million, two 100MW plants
2022	World Bank	n/a	US$400 million for solar mini-grid investments
2023	Nuru	DRC	Seeking US$300 million to reach five million people by 2024

Sources: Media reports, government press releases and company statements.

Private finance has often been supplemented by development finance such as British International Investment (2021), the development finance institution of the UK government, which is providing debt finance to the US$100 million solar hybrid Gridworks project, alongside the potential interest of the Private Infrastructure Development Group, a private finance collective funded by six governments (the UK, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Australia, Sweden and Germany), and the World Bank’s International Finance Cooperation.

The imperialist profit-seeking dimension includes the conversion of solar expansion into an asset stream for finance capital through the deployment of the ‘pay-as-you-go’ (PAYGO) system, which allows households to purchase solar home systems through a range of flexible, digital payment methods (Baker 2023). This is, for example, the energy delivery model used by British firm Bboxx, hoping to reach 10 million Congolese with solar home systems in the coming years. In some areas, Bboxx is also renting out televisions, offering rural Congolese households access to solar, plus a package of more than 100 channels on French-owned provider Canal + (Shetty 2022).

Through the development of a PAYGO delivery model to increase the market for its energy and other products, the off-grid solar sector has become part of the financial technology (or fin-tech) industry that has served in the realm of mobile money to enrich fin-tech firms and shareholders. As Bateman, Duvendack and Loubere (2019, 490) concluded in an earlier article in this journal, based on a detailed case study of M-Pesa in Kenya, ‘fin-tech is very clearly designed to hoover up value and deposit it into the hands of a narrow global digital-financial elite that are the main forces behind the fin-tech revolution.’ The DRC’s large market for solar expansion has been attracting considerable interest from this same digital-financial elite, as testified by the range of Northern-financed, profit-seeking solar investments that have entered the country following energy sector liberalisation.

Taken together, these dynamics mirror the forced integration of the DRC into the emerging global capitalist economy at the end of the nineteenth century and which continued throughout the twentieth century, when the DRC remained ‘linked to the Occident in a neo-colonial relation insofar as it remains a simple supplier of raw materials and importer of manufactured goods’ (Kabongo 1999, 414). It has been achieved, in line with Kohli’s thesis, by undermining Congolese sovereignty through the post-war liberalisation of its mining and energy sectors and by establishing open access to the Congolese economy for the extraction of low-cost, low-carbon metals and the entry of renewable energy finance and technology, as competing hegemonic powers – most notably China, the US the EU – seek to advance their green economic agendas and interests.

Sovereignty and the quest for national development

Under Joseph Kabila’s administration (2001–2019), national economic development was premised upon leveraging the DRC’s comparative advantage in minerals and metals, with the mining sector seen as ‘capable of realising the government’s vision to make the DRC an emerging country by 2030 and a global power by 2060’ (DRC Ministry of Mines 2017, 2). This has continued into the Tshisekedi administration, where the underlying logic is well summarised in the country’s National Strategic Development Plan 2019–2023, adopted shortly after Tshisekedi’s arrival in office:

the extractive and agricultural sectors are thus considered as the two main productive sectors which, with deepened value chains, will found the Congolese economy at the first stage of its sequential evolution towards an inclusive growth economy. These sectors will have a knock-on effect on other sectors, such as industry, commerce and tourism. (DRC Government 2019, 2–3)

There has, however, been some change within this overall pattern of continuity, with state officials in recent years undertaking efforts to resist imperial encroachment and reassert a greater degree of sovereign ownership and control over the country’s mineral wealth.

These efforts began under the Kabila administration with the adoption of a new Mining Code on 9 March 2018. This marked the end of a six-year battle between the Congolese government and foreign mining corporates, the latter of whom had bitterly resisted any effort to increase taxes and royalty rates, including through a series of public statements alongside arbitration and mine closure threats. Congolese state officials held their ground, however, and many of the desired changes went through (Ross 2022). Most prominent among these were the designation of cobalt as a strategic mineral, subjecting it to a 10% royalty rate (up from 2%), the increase of state ownership in all licensed mining firms from 5% to 10%, and the introduction of a 50% windfall profit tax.

Next, in November 2019, under the presidency of Felix Tshisekedi, the Congolese government established the state-owned Entreprise Générale du Cobalt (EGC). EGC was swiftly designated with the sole authority to buy and export all artisanal and small-scale (ASM) cobalt (Deberdt 2021), which accounts for an estimated 5 to 15% of total cobalt production in the DRC. Formed partly as a response to growing concerns around labour and human rights issues in ASM cobalt mining (see, for example, Amnesty International 2016), EGC’s founding was also an attempt to wrest control over the processing and export of ASM cobalt from a range of foreign-owned refineries (BGR 2021). In October 2020, EGC entered into a five-year agreement to sell its cobalt to Swiss commodity trader Trafigura in return for an initial US$60 million of financing (Kavanagh 2021), although the new state entity continues to face liquidity challenges and remains largely inactive at the time of writing.

Third, at the DRC Africa Business Forum held in Kinshasa in November 2021, the government unveiled plans to move up the estimated US$8.8 trillion electric vehicle battery value chain from mineral exploitation to transformation and eventually to the domestic manufacture and export of batteries. These plans were further solidified in May 2022, when the Congolese and Zambian governments signed a memorandum of understanding to create a regional African value chain for the production of batteries and electric vehicles (UN Economic Commission for Africa 2021; Wansi 2022). Finally, in May 2023, President Tshisekedi undertook a state visit to China, in part seeking to gain majority ownership over Sicomines, a copper and cobalt joint venture in which Chinese firms hold 68% of the equity and which the Tshisekedi administration believes was significantly undervalued at the time of its signing back in 2008 (The Continent 2023).

Yet despite these efforts and ambitions, there is little evidence from post-independence attempts at mining-led industrialisation in the DRC to create much cause for optimism, and even less from the last two decades of pursuing this national development strategy in the context of a twenty-first century landscape of foreign corporate-owned mining. Despite helping deliver sustained high GDP growth rates throughout most of the Kabila administration, mining sector growth failed to translate into greater household income, poverty reduction, the emergence of domestic industry, or significantly improved wages and conditions for most workers (Marysse 2015; Otchia 2015; Lukusa 2016; Marivoet, De Herdt, and Ulimwengu 2019; Radley 2020a; 2020b). In 2019, at the end of the most recent commodity boom and seven decades of efforts to diversify the productive base of the Congolese economy through mining-led industrialisation, 93% of total national exports derived from just three metal commodities: copper (57%), cobalt (28%), and gold (8%) (EITI 2021, 260). While domestic forms of ownership and control should help staunch the overseas syphoning of value associated with foreign investment in the mining sector (Trapido 2015), the structural constraints of price volatility, enclavity, and low labour absorption greatly restrict the ability of mining industrialisation to stimulate broader-based processes of social and economic development in the DRC, irrespective of ownership and management structures (Radley 2023).

It could reasonably be countered that cobalt provides an exceptional and unprecedented opportunity to overturn this dismal historical record, given the likely sustained demand and high level of known world reserves located in the DRC. Offering tentative support to this, there is some early evidence to suggest that the new Mining Code has delivered increased fiscal revenue for the Congolese state and therefore, in theory, increased financing for productive reinvestment in the domestic economy and social welfare provision. Total revenue generated by the extractive industries in 2018 and 2019, the first two years after the adoption of the Code, was recorded at US$2.9 billion and US$2.7 billion respectively, up from an annual average of US$1.3 billion between 2010 and 2017 (Figure 2). Increases in production levels alone fail to account for the scale of this change, which also took place despite a crash in the price of cobalt and a steadily declining copper price across the two-year period immediately following the Code’s adoption, suggesting the new fiscal dispensations enshrined in the 2018 Code might be a significant driver of the rise in revenue.

Figure 2.

DRC extractive industry government revenue, 2010 to 2019 (millions of current US$).

Source: EITI database and country reports.

Yet, and potentially more constraining than the challenges presented by both seeking to move as a late entrant into an electric battery value chain already dominated by early movers in Asia, North America and Europe, and by efforts in the global North to increase domestic cobalt production and processing capacity, green technology manufacturers are moving fast to reduce or eliminate the use of cobalt in many of their products. This is largely motivated by the desire of foreign corporations to reduce their dependence on the DRC due to perceived political volatility and the reputational damage they incur sourcing cobalt from a country where its production has been associated with human and labour rights abuses, including child labour (Amnesty International 2016).

Current commercial cathodes used in electrical vehicle batteries, for example – the major driver of cobalt demand and where cobalt is the most expensive material in the product – contain 15 to 20% cobalt, down from 60% in the first generation of lithium-ion batteries, and the industry is actively developing 10% cobalt cathodes (US Department of Energy 2019). Many electric vehicle manufacturers, such as Tesla, are already using cobalt-free batteries, and in March 2023 a team of US-based chemical engineers generated much media interest after they published a paper claiming metal-free, water-based battery electrodes have up to 1000% more energy storage capacity than existing metal-based alternatives (Ma et al. 2023).

Whether or not this latest research ends up revolutionising the battery industry – and most likely it will not – it is nonetheless indicative of a green technological frontier related to the use of cobalt that is advancing rapidly. The medium- to long-term dependence of the global economy on Congolese cobalt as a critical low-carbon metal is far from certain. Here, the DRC once more forcefully confronts the limits and vulnerabilities of seeking national development and prosperity on the subordinate terms set for it by imperial powers: via deeper integration into the global capitalist economy as an exporter of primary commodities. The precarity of long-term development planning and industrial strategy based on the sale of a commodity whose demand lies beyond national control is readily apparent in the case of Congolese cobalt, even more so where any regulatory attempt to increase its price will only serve to further motivate and accelerate industry efforts to reduce or eliminate its use in final products.

While acknowledging the limits of a national development strategy in the DRC founded upon the foreign-owned corporate extraction of low-carbon metals, it might be countered that the expansion of renewable energy nonetheless introduces a new dynamic, improving the welfare of millions of Congolese by delivering access to modern forms of energy, while driving transformative economic development in the process. These are generally the set of assumptions underpinning development institutions and agencies promoting renewable energy expansion in energy-poor regions across the global South (see, for example, USAID 2015; African Energy Commission 2019), and a techno-optimist strand of social science literature investigating the effects of this expansion (see, for example, Smith and Urpelainen 2014; Comello et al. 2017).

Theoretically, this line of thinking can be traced to New Institutional Economics (NIE), where economic development is conceptualised as being held back by market barriers. Once these barriers are removed, individuals can ‘use their rational perceptions … to navigate transactions and make the most profitable decisions – aggregating to generate economic growth’ (Perry 2019, 4–5). For NIE proponents, liberation technologies – such as solar power – can ‘level the playing field’ by allowing poor countries and households to participate more fully in the global economy (Mann and Iazzolino 2019, 1). Yet notably, techno-optimist claims about the potential of renewable energy expansion in the global South to drive economic development are often either unsubstantiated or based on references to historic experiences of electrification in the global North (Radley and Lehmann-Grube 2022). Moreover, evidence for increased electrification rates as a causal driver of economic development is far from compelling (Stern, Burke, and Bruns 2017).

To return to the case of solar expansion in the DRC, of particular importance is that this expansion is taking place within an overall shift from energy being delivered as a centralised, state-led public good to a decentralised and privatised for-profit commodity. Alongside issues of energy quality, reliability and affordability associated with this new delivery model (Cross and Neumark 2022; Radley and Lehmann-Grube 2022), several studies have noted that private energy firms do not always assume the maintenance of off-grid solar systems and the cost of this maintenance can often surpass what rural households or communities can afford (Laufer and Schäfer 2011; Dauenhauer et al. 2020; Samarakoon 2020; Sarker et al. 2020). It remains to be seen who in the DRC will assume the financial burden of maintenance and repair within the market-led, off-grid delivery model driving expanded access to solar in the country, beyond an initial guarantee period, but the potential for this model to privatise profits and socialise losses, especially in relation to solar home systems and rural community mini-grids, looms large.

In addition, where studies have noted the recent emergence of the PAYGO model, this has generally been uncritically celebrated for its potential to deliver solar energy products to income-poor rural households unable to afford the full upfront cost (GSMA 2016; ODI 2016; Adwek et al. 2020; Bisaga et al. 2020). Yet, to return to Bateman, Duvendack and Loubere (2019), the mobile money platform M-Pesa in Kenya was found to be associated with rising over-indebtedness and other issues that constrain rather than liberate fin-tech users. It is partly for this reason that Baker (2023, 207) questions the poverty-reducing potential of off-grid PAYGO solar, highlighting instead how the system threatens to function as ‘a conduit for consumer debt’. As both Radley and Lehmann-Grube (2022) and Baker (2023) have noted, the implications of this recent development in the solar industry for individuals and households seeking pathways out of poverty, both in the DRC and elsewhere, are yet to be fully explored.

Conclusion

In alignment with Kohli’s thesis, green imperialism in the DRC has involved the dismantling of Congolese sovereign ownership and control over its natural resource wealth (water and sunlight alongside low-carbon metals) and establishing open access to the Congolese economy. While helping to advance the green economic agendas of hegemonic powers by securing them access to low-cost, low-carbon metals and a market for the entry of renewable energy finance and technologies, the political response to green imperialism in the DRC appears to be reproducing a model of mining-led national development that historically has delivered little by way of material improvements for most of the population, thus undermining the prospects of prosperity in the country. Albeit this time around there is the possibility of expanded access for some to renewable forms of energy as a foreign-owned private commodity, with all the limitations and contradictions this new model of energy delivery entails.

Moreover, as the Congolese state claims a greater share of revenues from the export of cobalt, copper and (potentially in the next several years) lithium, it becomes materially more reliant on these same exports, further constraining the space for a shift in national development strategy. Yet as Lawrence (2023, 526) noted in the previous issue of this journal, ‘there have always been alternatives open to African governments.’ One of these is Samir Amin’s (1990) strategy of ‘delinking’, proposed to conceptualise how national sovereign development projects in the global periphery might best be promoted. The strategy centres around breaking from the demands imposed by the external global economy and reorienting strategy and policy towards serving domestic demand and promoting popular development, grounded in an understanding of the needs and interests of workers and peasants (Kvangraven, Styve, and Ushehwedu 2021).

A year before his death in 2018, Amin emphasised that delinking was not intended as a blueprint, but highlighted nonetheless that industrialisation for the mass production of domestic goods, the revival of peasant agriculture, and (re)asserting sovereign control over productive activity and economic policy would all constitute core elements of a delinking agenda (Zeilig 2017). The spirit and ultimate objective of delinking is perhaps best captured in Amin’s comment on the problem with World Bank-driven structural adjustment:

it is requested that the Congo adjust to the needs of the US, not for the US to adjust to the needs of Congo. So, it’s that adjustment, which is simply one side adjusting. Now, delinking means you reject that logic, and therefore you try to, and succeed, as far as you can, to have your own strategy, independent of the trends of the unequal global system. (Zeilig 2017)

At the current juncture, a few months out from presidential elections in December 2023, the Tshisekedi administration has been firmly embracing rather than rejecting the logic imposed upon the DRC by the low-carbon capitalist visions emanating from the global economy. Most of the Congolese population, it has been argued in this article, will likely fail to reap any tangible benefit or improvement from such a stance.

What possibility, then, that electoral change might lead to new forms of national political power interacting differently with the international economic forces swirling around the supposed greening of the global economy? In March 2023, President Tshisekedi named Jean-Pierre Bemba as Vice Prime Minister of Defence and Vital Kamerhe as Vice Prime Minister of the Economy. In doing so, he greatly strengthened his own candidacy by co-opting two of the DRC’s major political heavyweights, both with large constituencies, onto his presidential ticket. This, alongside Tshisekedi’s control of key electoral institutions and acts of political repression in the run-up to elections, will make it difficult for any opposition candidate – among whom feature Augustin Matata Ponyo (a former Prime Minister under Joseph Kabila), Moise Katumbi (a businessman and former Governor of Katanga Province), Martin Fayulu (a former ExxonMobil executive, national MP, and presidential candidate in 2018), and Denis Mukwege (a gynaecologist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate) – to mount a successful bid for the presidency.

Taking a longer-term perspective, serious efforts to construct a sovereign national development project in the DRC have historically been met with interference and obstruction by imperial powers with vested interests in maintaining open access to the Congolese economy on favourable terms. This history runs from the US- and Belgian-backed assassination of nationalist leader and former Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba on 17 January 1961, through to the immediate support and backing provided by the US, UK, Belgium, France and others for the official presidential elections results in 2011 and 2018, despite well-documented irregularities and electoral fraud. In both instances, hegemonic powers preferred the incumbency of candidates showing little inclination towards the construction of a sovereign national project, and thus deemed more likely to help them maintain open access to the economy, than more threatening alternatives. This was certainly the case with veteran opposition leader Etienne Tshisekedi in 2011, and to some extent with Martin Fayulu in 2018, who was at the time building a reputation as Etienne Tshisekedi’s potential political successor, having indicated his desire to revisit mining contracts and the country’s relations with foreign investors more generally if elected to the presidency.

Despite all of this, it must not be forgotten amid the controversies around the presidential election of Felix Tshisekedi that the removal of his predecessor Joseph Kabila in 2019 was the culmination of a long battle fought and won by tens if not hundreds of thousands of Congolese who took to the streets at various moments in the years leading up to the election – both in Kinshasa and elsewhere across the country – to protest against Kabila’s many attempts to maintain his grip on power, too many of whom paid the ultimate sacrifice through loss of life. If the pursuit of an alternative, anti-imperialist national development project is to emerge in the DRC, it will only be through the route of such struggle and popular demands imposed upon the country’s political leadership. It would be unwise to rule out the 2023 elections as another focal point around which such struggle and demands will continue to build and take hold.

Notes

1

A major contradiction of green imperialism is the ecological disruption and damage associated with the pursuit of low-carbon transitions based on their metal and mineral intensity (Sovacool et al. 2020).

2

A few months earlier, in July 2022, the UK published its first ever Critical Minerals Strategy, motivated by similar logics to the EU.

3

Law No. 14/011 of 17 June 2014.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Divin-Luc Bikubanya and Stylianos Moshonas for their careful reading of an earlier draft of this article, as well as the reviewers and editors for their comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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