Africa as a Climate Solutions Leader? Anti-Politics, Power and the Political Economy of Summit-Driven Climate Narratives

Abstract Africa is increasingly presented not primarily as a site of climate vulnerability, but as a provider of global climate solutions. Across Africa Climate Summit declarations and associated African Union climate communications, the continent is framed as a source of renewable energy potential, carbon sinks, critical minerals and demographic assets capable of supporting the global transition. While this repositioning has been widely welcomed as a departure from narratives of victimhood, this paper asks how the emerging ‘Africa as a climate solutions leader’ narrative shapes investment-led climate governance and what political-economic implications this has for African development. Drawing on James Ferguson’s concept of the anti-politics machine and Michel Foucault’s analysis of power/knowledge, supported by Jessop’s strategic relational approach, together with thematic analysis of elite interviews with African climate negotiators, policymakers, civil society representatives and subject experts, as well as participant observation, the paper examines how summit-driven climate narratives increasingly translate political questions of historical responsibility and redistribution into technical questions of investment mobilisation and financial coordination. It argues that rather than representing a straightforward expansion of African agency, the solutions-leadership narrative risks reproducing older relations of dependency and extraction by reconstituting Africa’s role from a site of vulnerability to a supplier of land, labour, minerals and carbon sinks for the global transition. The paper concludes by re-centring Africa’s claim to Special Needs and Special Circumstances and advancing an Afrocentric normative-political refusal grounded in justice, policy space and narrative sovereignty.