This essay examines green development as a mechanism to widen the North-South inequality in the context of South Asia, focusing on the climatic resilience structures of Bangladesh and Pakistan as core case studies. As South Asia is one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable regions, green development has become crucial for its economic sustainability and growth. Drawing on the dependency theory, including Arndt’s Marxist explanation of dependency, and the core-periphery framework, supported by the logic of Acemoglu and Robinson to dismiss geography, culture, and ignorance as drivers of underdevelopment, the paper argues that the green gap is a product of external extractive institutional frameworks.  

The essay investigates how green development agendas such as green financing, carbon crediting and offsetting, and green technology transfer subordinate the South Asian economies in the global market and generate a vicious cycle of green debt, encouraging green dependency in the Global South. Using a comparative qualitative approach, this essay examines how green development reinforces structural inequalities through extractive pathways in international financial institutions’ green financing and through carbon-emission policies that impose disproportionate burdens on South Asian economies.

Climate change has emerged as a global crisis with impacts that transcend borders, highlighting and exacerbating longstanding North-South structural inequalities. Current debates on climate governance, such as green dependency, reveal that these inequalities are rooted in colonial extraction practices and the inconsistent incorporation of the Global South into the international market (Arndt, 1987). The process of unequal industrial development and resource extraction has generated technological and financial asymmetries, which established Western dominance within global institutions.

Arndt’s Marxist underdevelopment thesis emphasizes that these inequalities are not incidental but rather a systematic process of capitalism that encourages production and accumulation in ways that benefit the core while reproducing dependency in the periphery (Arndt, 1987, p. 132). In this era of climate transition, these asymmetries have not vanished; instead, they clearly determine how carbon policies, green finance frameworks, and green technologies should be drafted and distributed. Thus, green development, which was previously glorified as a solution to the climate crisis, is now operating as a tool by the core to reinforce inequalities, extract resources from the periphery, and use them as a market for its “green technology.”

South Asia perfectly exemplifies these inequalities. As one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable regions, the subcontinent, being an agrarian region, faces constant threats from rising temperatures, flooding, cyclones, and irregular monsoon patterns, leading to environmental degradation. In particular, Pakistan and Bangladesh are among the most vulnerable states, as their socioeconomic stability heavily depends on climatic conditions; thus, they heavily rely on climate financing, adaptation loans, carbon market requirements, and access to green technology (UNCTAD, 2023). These factors make them dependent on international financial institutions (IFIs) for sustainable development. Apparently, these mechanisms assist these states in climate risk management, but deep down, they reinforce structural dependency by imposing policy conditionalities, green debt, and technological limitations on their already fragile economies (Dafermos, 2025).

This essay employs multiple theoretical frameworks to analyze these structural differences. Arndt’s Marxian explanation of structural dependence provides a foundation for illustrating how peripheral economies remain subordinated by an imbalanced flow of capital and technology, thus echoing the rationale of the traditional core-periphery framework (Arndt 1987, pp. 115-147). This claim is supported by the externalization of Acemoglu and Robinson’s (2012) theory of extractive institutions. Collectively, these approaches suggest that green development may, in fact, exacerbate rather than diminish the North-South divide.

Green Dependency and Struggles of South Asian Economies

Though modernists consider developed nations’ models—such as green development—a universal pathway for sustainability, many Marxist scholars view it as one of the root causes of global inequality. Arndt, while explaining the neomarxist dependency approach, states that underdeveloped nations do not lag due to slow progress, lack of development potential, or other factors such as culture or geography; rather, they have been........

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