The System Changes, Inequality Does Not

Abstract

This article examines climate change as a systemic outcome of global inequality rather than a purely environmental failure. Drawing on a world-systems perspective, it argues that the contemporary climate crisis is embedded in the asymmetric distribution of economic, technological, and political power that structures the global order. The analysis focuses on three interconnected arenas—economic, technological, and political—through which climate-related inequalities are produced and reproduced. In the economic arena, the green transition unfolds within deeply uneven global value chains, allowing countries in the Global North to sustain high levels of consumption while externalizing ecological and social costs to the Global South. The technological arena shows how digitalization and low-carbon technologies reinforce new forms of dependency through intellectual property regimes, data extraction, and control over critical minerals. In the political arena, multilateral climate governance remains shaped by Northern preferences, market-oriented mechanisms, and technocratic decision-making, limiting the scope for addressing historical responsibility and redistribution. By situating climate change within these intersecting arenas, the article demonstrates that inequality is not an unintended side effect of climate policy but a politically produced condition that shapes vulnerability and response capacity. The climate crisis thus appears as a manifestation of a broader crisis of the global order, one that cannot be addressed without redistributing power and reorienting global governance toward planetary limits.