The Architecture of Liberation — The Role of the Just Transition Mechanism

At the June Intersessionals (SB64) of the UNFCCC in Bonn, Germany, Jacqueline Patterson, Executive Director of The Chisholm Legacy Project, spoke at a panel on June 8, 2026: “How can the Just Transition Mechanism support holistic transition across sectors?” With co-panelists: Eloise Guillon of World Animal Protection, Catalina Caro of Friends of the Earth – Colombia (CENSAT), Nuri Syed Corser of War on Want, and (moderator) Chadli Sadorra of Asian People’s Movement on Debt and Development (AMPDD). The panel was also organized by the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice, Colectivo VientoSur, Just Transition Alliance, and Human and Environmental Development Agenda (HEDA).

The following are Jacqui’s remarks and call to action:

Fellow panelists, delegates, and comrades gathered here in Bonn. The time for half-measures, incremental reform, and greenwashed capitalism is long-past expired. We cannot continue to throw cups of water at the edges of a house that’s on fire. We cannot continue to negotiate the terms of our “managed decline.” Our mission here and beyond is to fundamentally redesign the architecture of our global systems. It is literally the only way that humanity will be able to mitigate and survive the climate crisis.

When the climate justice movement began to rise, we all recognized then that the goal was never mere inclusion within an extractive system which is actively fulfilling the vision of its designers.

Communities on the frontlines recognized that the goal must be systemic transformation. If we are to survive the climate crisis, we recognized that it is the violent culmination of centuries of extraction, colonialism, and systemic exclusion.

So out of the sobering and somewhat daunting recognition that we must systematically dismantle the financial and economic paradigms that manufactured this emergency, I ground my remarks today in the Ten Mandates for Liberatory Climate Finance, published by The Chisholm Legacy Project and Gilmore Khandhar, which builds on the work and leadership of Afro Descendant frontliners across the globe.

Based in African Traditional Knowledge Systems, these mandates provide a blueprint for a systems-changing paradigm. And, as we all know, a blueprint is only as good as its builders. If we are to play our roles as architects and implementers of liberation, we must look to the concrete, living exemplars across the globe who are already breathing life into these mandates every single day.

The Just Transition Mechanism: Coordinated Action and Living Libraries

To the question of how the UNFCCC Just Transition Mechanism can support coordinated transitions across energy, food systems, and land use sectors. As we all know too well, right now, international climate policy operates in silos. We treat land as a carbon sink, food as a fungible commodity, and energy as an isolated technological hurdle. But, as we all experience firsthand on the ground, these systems are deeply intertwined.

As we turn to the ninth mandate, which is Transform International Climate Finance Architecture, it demands that we reject fragmented funding models. If the Just Transition Mechanism is to have any real teeth, it must dismantle the extractive approach to energy and agriculture. When we transition our grids away from fossil fuels, we must not violently displace communities to mine transition minerals. We must enact the mandate to Legitimate Multiple Knowledge Systems.

When we honor traditional knowledge, we recognize that our frontline communities are living libraries. The Afro-Brazilian Quilombola settlements are successfully defending the Amazon by integrating ancestral agro-ecological practices with aggressive legal campaigns to protect their traditional land titles. Their work proves that food sovereignty, land use, and climate mitigation are a single, coordinated struggle.

We must also learn the cautionary tale from the ongoing struggles in Kenya, where Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities are actively resisting violent displacement caused by neo-colonial “carbon offset”projects.

A Just Transition Mechanism must unequivocally outlaw these land grabs. It must coordinate across sectors by legally protecting the land tenure of the people who already know how to steward it.

Aligning Climate Action Through Integrated Approaches

To the question of integrating approaches that align climate action across multiple sectors, we must achieve this by adhering to the mandates that call us to Fundamentally Reimagine Climate Finance and to Center Reparative Justice.

For decades, the global financial system has dictated that climate mitigation and adaptation compete for scraps of funding. An integrated approach recognizes that we cannot achieve environmental repair without economic and racial repair.

I was on a panel on managed retreat in Washington, DC (the belly of the beast!) and someone asked me: How do we deal with communities that insist on rebuilding in threatened areas when there are limited resources for recovery? To which I answered: With all due respect, we are asking the wrong questions. We need to talk about redirecting funds from fossil fuel subsidies to energy efficiency and redirecting the billions of dollars we are spending every day on the war, before we start trying to force people who are least responsible for the climate crisis to upend their entire lives, while we sit comfortably getting paid to talk about it all day every day.

There are integrated approaches to climate action, effectively executed in places such as Port Arthur, Texas, and throughout the petrochemical corridors of the U.S. Gulf Coast. In these historic Black communities, organizers are fighting the toxic emissions of the oil and gas industry — and actively building the alternative. By developing community-owned solar microgrids, they are executing a profound, integrated strategy. A community-owned microgrid is an energy intervention, and it is also a multi-solver. It’s a housing justice intervention that lowers utility burdens, an economic empowerment strategy that builds local wealth, and a public health necessity that shuts down polluting infrastructure.

To successfully scale these integrated sectors globally, we must operationalize the mandate to Measure Success Holistically. We can no longer kid ourselves by measuring the success of climate action by tons of carbon traded on a European exchange. We must measure success by the reduction of asthma rates in Port Arthur, by the acreage of land secured by the Quilombolas, and by the actual redistribution of wealth to communities and populations who are historically marginalized.

From “Trade-Offs” to Visionary Leadership

Finally, in answer to the question about trade-offs… As we push for these integrated systems, we frequently hear policymakers warn about the inevitable “trade-offs” between environmental, social, and economic goals. Again, we must rigorously interrogate who exactly is being asked to make these sacrifices. All too often, “trade-off” is coded language for sacrificing frontline communities in the Global South to preserve the unbroken economic growth of the Global North.

To identify and address these supposed trade-offs, we must look to the mandates that demand we Follow Global South Leadership, and Advance Democratic and Participatory Governance.

The friction between economic and environmental goals only exists because our current global economy is a dig, burn, and dump machine. We resolve this friction by looking to models like the community-controlled Green Banks emerging in Ghana, the homeland of our lead on the Global Afro-Descendant Climate Justice Collaborative, Cheryl Kwapong. By keeping investment capital local and directing it toward regenerative agriculture and decentralized renewable energy, these institutions are actively refusing the premise that development must be extractive. They are proving that when capital is democratized, the false dichotomy between a healthy economy and a healthy planet dissolves.

We also resolve these trade-offs by listening to the communities on the frontlines. At the 2023 People’s Health Tribunal, leaders from Mozambique, Uganda, and the Niger Delta testified about the devastating toll of the oil and gas industry on their ecosystems and bodies. They made it undeniably clear that the economic “benefits” touted by multinational fossil fuel corporations are an illusion paid for with Black and Indigenous lives. True participatory governance ensures that people on the frontlines dictate policy. These false “trade-offs” continue to be actively abetted by closed-door boardroom compromises. We can only resolve these trade-offs by ensuring that those who bear the greatest risks author the solutions.

Redefining Stakeholder Collaboration and Building Autonomous Infrastructure

Finally, we must critically examine stakeholder collaboration in the pursuit of sustainable and inclusive climate action. Contrary to oft proffered concessions, merely inviting organizers to sit on an advisory panel while the purse strings remain tightly controlled by bureaucratic institutions, is far from being the definition of equity. I trust that if we have our eyes open, we all recognize that token inclusion is not power. True collaboration requires financial autonomy.

The mandates call upon us to Build Black-Led Autonomous Financial Infrastructure, and to Resource Movement-Building. We must shift from transactional stakeholder engagement to transformational power-sharing. This means creating direct-access funding mechanisms that bypass the red tape of international finance and flow directly to community-controlled entities.

We see this structural transformation taking root in the emergence of community-controlled climate funds across the African continent and the Caribbean. In the aftermath of catastrophic, climate-driven events, such as the devastating floods in Madagascar or the hurricane that decimated Barbuda, frontline coalitions are not just demanding relief; they are doing the rigorous work of building parallel institutional infrastructure. They are establishing regional, direct-access financial vehicles so that movement leaders do not have to beg traditional, colonial institutions for the resources to rebuild and survive.

This is what genuine, structurally sound collaboration looks like. Unlike the current system that forces frontline communities to be positioned as supplicants at the power table of the profiteers. True collaboration is fully resourced. It is uncompromisingly autonomous. And it builds the structural capacity of those on the frontlines to govern their own climate solutions. It sets the standard for how the UNFCCC and global finance must engage with frontline leadership moving forward.

Conclusion: Divest from Extraction, Invest in Life and Liberation

In closing, a truly just transition requires innovation, imagination, and bold courage. It requires us to abandon the incrementalism that has failed us for decades and to embrace a transformational roadmap for a just and regenerative system.

We already have the blueprints. We already have the living libraries. From the Quilombola territories of Brazil, to the microgrids of Port Arthur, to the green banks of Ghana, and the autonomous funds of the Caribbean, we already have the exemplars proving that a democratized economy is possible. The wealth already exists to fund a global Just Transition. But it is currently locked in fossil fuel subsidies, in bloated global military budgets, and in the private coffers off those who profit from planetary destruction.

We must democratize these resources. We must enforce the Ten Mandates for Liberatory Climate Finance. We must leave this convening with a radical, unyielding commitment to dismantle the extractive economy. We must step fully into our roles as architects of liberation, divest from extraction, and invest in the regenerative, self-determined future that our communities deserve. That we all deserve.

Thank you.