The alleged creation of 10,000 new jobs187 has in previous projects proven to be nothing but a pipe dream.188 Portraying the TuNur and XLinks projects as ‘capturing and connecting the power of nature’189 and ‘opening new green energy corridors between Africa and Europe’190 obscures the fact that the benefits from the purported ‘connection’ or ‘corridor’ go in only one direction. [...] This is also the case in Tunisia, where international financial institutions (IFIs) such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have put increasing pressure on the Tunisian government to reduce energy subsidies and to further privatise STEG because of its high level of debt.202 While the citizens of Morocco and Tunisia bear the brunt of the costs, a few TNCs reap the profits. [...] Rather than paying for the consequences that the carbon-producing industries in the global North have caused to the entire planet and supporting countries in the global South to mitigate and adapt, the current donor system merely deepens pre-existing dependencies, while outsourcing many of the solutions to climate change to the global South. [...] During the summit, over 300 activists from around the world gathered for four days and set out a list of demands222 highlighting the interconnectivity of the struggles described in this essay and of topics such as debt, climate justice and migration, and the urgency to tackle them collectively. [...] Finally, in the context of the Israeli onslaught on Gaza, of widespread protests against the normalisation of Arab–Israeli relations, and the COP28 climate summit in Dubai – where the space for resistance was heavily constrained – the power of bottom-up mobilisation and street pressure was obvious once again.
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