“The highest leverage point — the place to intervene in a system — is in the mindset or paradigm out of which the system arises. But it is also the hardest to change.” — Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems
Mattei and Kvangraven’s critique of mainstream economics is powerful and largely correct. Epistemic decolonization — changing what counts as knowledge, who gets to ask which questions, what the discipline renders visible and invisible — operates at the highest leverage point in any system: the paradigm level. This is not low-stakes academic work. It is, in Meadows’ terms, an intervention at the level where systems are born.
But there is a second task that critique alone cannot perform: instantiating the new paradigm in working institutions. Pieces of that task already exist — in Ecuador’s constitutional rights of nature, in Bolivia’s vivir bien frameworks, in Zapatista autonomous governance, in debt-for-nature swaps, in regional monetary arrangements like the Chiang Mai Initiative. What has largely not happened is the scaling and connecting of these alternatives into an architecture with enough coherence to function as a system.
This essay asks what that connecting work requires and why it has been so hard to do — not as a master framework that supersedes the decolonial one, but as a set of tools for a construction phase that critique has made possible.
A note on posture: this essay is written by someone who has been trying to build some of that architecture, in the form of the Global Governance Frameworks project and its Sovereign Debt Transformation Protocol. I am not sure it is adequate. That uncertainty is part of the argument.
I. What the Critique Gets Right
The story mainstream economics tells about capitalism is a story of internal development — markets expanding, technology advancing, institutions improving — that happened first in Europe and can, in principle, be replicated anywhere. Kvangraven’s central point is that this story isn’t merely incomplete; it is structurally misleading. The development of European capitalism did not happen inside Europe. It happened through the transatlantic slave trade, colonial extraction, the violent dispossession of land and labor across continents. To tell the story without these preconditions is not a simplification. It is an erasure — one that makes the global order appear natural rather than constructed, and that makes the poverty of the global south look like a failure of development rather than a product of it.
This erasure is not incidental to the discipline. Economics maintains it through specific methodological choices: methodological individualism, which reduces economies to the behavior of individual agents; and methodological nationalism, which treats nations as self-contained units whose trajectories can be analyzed in isolation. These frameworks make it structurally impossible to see the relationships between northern wealth and southern poverty, between the inclusive institutions of settler colonies and the extractive institutions imposed on the rest. As Kvangraven notes, many economics students complete their degrees without ever hearing the word “capitalism.” They learn about “the economy” — an abstraction that presents the existing order as a set of laws rather than a set of choices.
The Cold War purge is a crucial part of this story. The narrowing of economics was not an intellectual evolution toward greater rigor. It was a political event: heterodox economists were driven out of departments, journals, and funding streams during the Cold War, leaving neoclassical economics as the dominant tradition not because it won on the merits but because its competitors were eliminated. And the purge continues in softer forms — through what gets published, what gets funded, what counts as “serious” work, and who gets hired.
The Ghana case makes this concrete in a way that abstract argument cannot. Ashanti Goldfields passes through colonial extraction under direct British control, partial nationalization after independence, a new wave of dispossession during 1980s liberalization as land is cleared for opencast mining, financialization in the 1990s that subjects the company to hedging instruments and margin calls biased against African corporations, a merger that moves the headquarters to South Africa, and finally labor informalization in the 2000s that reproduces conditions resembling the colonial era. This is not a story of development with setbacks. It is a cycle — colonialism as a pattern that changes form but does not end. Each phase generates new mechanisms of extraction that are rendered invisible by the economic frameworks of the moment.
Financial subordination is the mechanism that keeps this cycle stable. Countries in the global south borrow at rates that can exceed ten percent while northern governments borrow at near zero. Currency hierarchies force dollar dependence, creating vulnerability to US monetary policy and geopolitical pressure. The IMF and World Bank, dominated by northern voting structures, enforce conditionality packages that deepen the dynamics they claim to resolve. This is not historical legacy. It is present-tense architecture.
These are not marginal critiques. Diagnosing the architecture of the problem accurately is itself paradigm-level work. It is a necessary condition for anything that follows.
II. Two Kinds of Construction
The common framing — critique on one side, construction on the other — is misleading, and this essay needs to be careful not to reproduce it.
Kvangraven is already building. Diversifying and Decolonizing Economics (D-Econ) is an institution. Alternative reading lists are infrastructure. Union organizing is institutional work. Public communication that makes economic power visible to non-specialists is construction at the epistemic level — the very level that Meadows identifies as highest leverage. The decolonial project is not merely naming problems; it is building the networks, curricula, and coalitions that make a different kind of economic thinking possible.
What is largely missing is a different kind of construction — not higher leverage, but a different register of work. Call it the technical-architectural layer: the measurement systems, verification infrastructure, governance architectures, and translation mechanisms that would allow an alternative paradigm to operate at the institutional level. Not the paradigm shift itself, but its instantiation in systems that move money, verify claims, hold authority, and connect across borders.
The social-epistemic construction is underway: alternative economics networks, decolonized curricula, coalition-building across movements, public communication infrastructure. The technical-architectural construction is partial and disconnected: Ecuador has constitutional rights of nature but struggles to operationalize them when oil revenue is needed. Bolivia enshrined buen vivir in its constitution while expanding lithium extraction. Debt-for-nature swaps exist but have been constrained by the financial logic they adopted to become legible. Regional monetary arrangements have been attempted but haven’t dislodged the underlying currency hierarchy.
The construction gap, in other words, is not a total absence. It is a fragmentation problem. Pieces of the alternative architecture exist in different places, developed by different actors, without the connective tissue to function together. The work that is missing is less about inventing new components than about building translation layers between existing ones — making Ecuador’s constitutional framework, Zapatista governance models, regional monetary experiments, and emerging measurement systems speak to each other.
This reframing matters because it changes the nature of the task. The essay is not arguing that critique needs to be supplemented by some entirely new kind of work. It is arguing that existing construction efforts need to be connected — and that the connection itself is a design problem that requires its own tools.
III. What Systems Thinking Adds
Systems thinking is not a superior framework that encompasses the decolonial critique. It is a toolkit — one among several — that is useful for a specific part of the work: understanding why extractive structures are stable, identifying where intervention is possible, and designing institutions that can resist being recaptured by the dynamics they aim to replace.
Feedback Loops, Not Just Flows
The debt-as-extraction story, as typically told, focuses on flows: money moves from south to north through debt service, profit repatriation, and unequal trade. This is accurate but incomplete. The stability of this arrangement — the reason it reproduces itself across decades and through changing institutional forms — depends on feedback loops that reinforce it.
Credit rating agencies reward fiscal austerity, which means countries that resist extractive conditionality are punished with higher borrowing costs. Currency hierarchies make dollar-denominated debt the only viable option for many countries, which deepens dependence on US monetary policy. IMF conditionality packages foreclose alternative development paths, which increases the pressure to export raw materials, which degrades ecological systems, which reduces future productive capacity, which increases the need to borrow. The cycle is not driven by any single actor’s malice. It is a system property — a reinforcing loop that stabilizes extraction regardless of the intentions of the people operating within it.
This matters for intervention design because it means that addressing any single element of the loop — debt relief, conditionality reform, capital controls — will tend to be absorbed by the other elements. The loop re-forms around the intervention. This is why debt relief campaigns, however necessary in the short term, have not changed the underlying dynamics: they address a flow without disrupting the feedback structure that regenerates the flow.
An alternative architecture would need to flip the loop: make regeneration — ecological restoration, community resilience, care work — count as debt service, so that the reinforcing dynamic runs in the opposite direction. Debt service leads to regeneration, which increases productive capacity, which reduces borrowing pressure, which creates space for further regeneration. This is the logic behind the Sovereign Debt Transformation Protocol, discussed in Section IV.
The Leverage Point Hierarchy Applied to Debt
Donella Meadows proposed a hierarchy of system interventions, running from low leverage (adjusting numbers and parameters) through medium leverage (changing the structure of information flows and rules) to high leverage (changing the goals of the system and the paradigm out of which it arises). Applied to sovereign debt:
At the lowest leverage, we find the interventions most commonly proposed: debt relief campaigns that reduce the stock of debt without changing the dynamics that regenerate it; conditionality reforms that adjust the terms without questioning the authority to impose them; voting right adjustments at the IMF that redistribute power at the margins.
At medium leverage: capital controls that change the structural relationship between national economies and global finance; SDR allocations that partially address the currency hierarchy; regional monetary funds like the Chiang Mai Initiative that create alternative coordination mechanisms. The Chiang Mai case is instructive — countries built a partial IMF alternative after the Asian Financial Crisis and partially succeeded, but the underlying dollar dependence and currency hierarchy remained. Structural intervention without paradigm change has limits.
At high leverage: changing what counts as debt service. If a country can service its obligations through verified ecological restoration rather than dollar-denominated cash flows, the entire logic of the debt relationship shifts. The obligation is no longer a claim on future extraction; it becomes a framework for regeneration.
At the highest leverage: changing what debt is — from a claim on past extraction to a shared stake in regenerative capacity. This is the paradigm shift that epistemic decolonization makes thinkable. The architectural work is about making it operational.
These levels are not a ranking of importance. Epistemic work and architectural work need to run together, because structural intervention without paradigm change gets absorbed, and paradigm change without institutional infrastructure creates a vacuum that existing power fills.
The Measurement Layer Is Load-Bearing
Any alternative architecture has to answer: measured how, verified by whom? This is not a technocratic detail. It is the point at which power gets encoded or disrupted.
Who controls the ledger controls the story.
GDP is not merely ideologically loaded. It is operationally necessary for the current system — the metric around which policy is designed, performance is evaluated, and creditworthiness is assessed. Without an alternative accounting system, even the most well-intentioned decolonized policies will be measured in GDP terms, and the measure will pull behavior back toward extraction. This is Goodhart’s Law operating at civilizational scale: the measure becomes the target, and the target shapes the system.
Building an alternative measurement system is therefore not a secondary task. It is the infrastructure on which everything else depends. And it is the point where the deepest design tensions live, because any measurement system that makes care work or ecological restoration legible to financial institutions risks financializing them — subjecting them to the same market logic that created the problem.
IV. Toward Institutional Architecture: A Named Attempt
This section is not a claim that the following is the answer. It is an account of one attempt — the Sovereign Debt Transformation Protocol, developed as part of the Global Governance Frameworks project — its logic, and where it is thin.
The SDTP extends the logic of existing debt-for-nature swaps. A country with significant bilateral debt and ecological assets — forests under deforestation pressure, degraded agricultural land, coastal ecosystems — would service a portion of that debt through verified ecological restoration and community care work. Conversion rates would be set not by creditor institutions but by a pluralist governance body that includes creditors, debtor governments, affected communities, and independent ecological assessors. Verification would combine satellite monitoring with ground-truthing by locally governed bodies — closer in model to community-based natural resource management than to World Bank certification.
For this to function at scale, five components are needed, and each carries its own difficulties.
First, an alternative measurement system that makes care work and ecological restoration legible as economic value — not as externalities to be corrected, but as the primary output being tracked. Existing frameworks provide starting points: wellbeing economics, Ecuador’s rights of nature, the capabilities approach. But operationalizing these at the transaction level — making them precise enough to determine whether a specific debt obligation has been met — is work that remains largely undone.
Second, a verification layer that is credible without being controlled by the creditors. This is the Oracle Problem applied to international finance: how do you verify claims about ecological restoration or care work in a way that is trustworthy without centralizing authority in the institutions whose power you are trying to redistribute? The SDTP proposes distributed verification through locally governed consortia, but the governance design for such bodies — who appoints them, who audits the auditors, how capture is prevented — is genuinely difficult.
Third, a translation mechanism between regenerative value and existing financial systems. A country saying “we are repaying our obligations in units of verified forest restoration” needs creditors to be able to engage with that claim rather than dismiss it as disguised default. This means the regenerative value needs to be convertible — which immediately creates the financialization pressure the system is trying to escape.
Fourth, constitutional authority: treaty-level standing that gives the architecture legal force. Without this, the framework operates at the pleasure of the existing institutional order and can be bypassed or revoked when political winds shift — as Ecuador’s experience with rights of nature demonstrates.
Fifth, minimum viable governance: a pilot path that doesn’t require the entire system to be transformed before a single case can proceed. This is perhaps the most practically important component and the one most likely to determine whether anything actually happens.
The Design Tension That Isn’t Solved
Any system that makes ecological restoration tradeable creates financialization pressure. The instruments that allow creditors to engage with regenerative value — the conversion rates, the tradeable credits, the financial interfaces — are exactly the mechanisms through which market logic colonizes new domains. Debt-for-nature swaps have already demonstrated this tendency: they became legible to financial institutions by adopting financial logic, which gave them reach but constrained what they could accomplish.
The SDTP attempts to address this through governance structure rather than market design — by ensuring that conversion rates are set by pluralist bodies rather than markets, and that the measurement system is governed by affected communities rather than creditor institutions. Whether governance constraints can hold against financialization pressure over time is genuinely uncertain. History suggests skepticism.
The Objection That Goes Deeper Than Governance Design
There is a more fundamental objection that deserves more than a procedural answer: technical architecture proposed by someone outside affected communities, without their participation in the design process, is itself a form of the eurocentrism this essay critiques. The assumption that the right framework, correctly designed, can address problems that are fundamentally about power and relationships — that assumption is precisely the depoliticization that Kvangraven identifies as the core problem with mainstream economics.
I do not have a complete response to this objection. The architecture is designed to be governed by the people it affects — not merely consulted, but in control of measurement standards, verification processes, and conversion rates. But “designed to be governed by” is a phrase written in a document by someone in Sweden. It is not the same as “is governed by.” The claim that this governance structure would actually hold — against capture by creditor institutions, against the interests of local elites, against the extractive dynamics of financialization, against the sheer gravitational pull of existing power — that claim cannot be made credible through argument. It can only become credible through practice.
What would that practice look like? At minimum, a pilot would need to demonstrate several things: that locally governed verification bodies can operate with enough rigor to satisfy creditors and enough independence to resist capture; that affected communities actually exercise governance authority rather than being tokenized in consultation processes; that the measurement system tracks what communities value rather than what financial institutions can price; and that these things hold over a timeframe long enough to outlast the initial political enthusiasm. This is a research agenda as much as a design project, and it requires collaboration with the people whose lives it would affect — not as validation of a pre-existing framework, but as co-designers with authority to reshape it.
V. Why Construction Is So Difficult
The critique exists and is mature. Alternatives have been attempted across decades: Jubilee campaigns, debt-for-nature swaps, regional currencies, commons-based accounting, constitutional rights of nature. Many have achieved real things. None have reached the scale or coherence needed to constitute a systemic alternative. Why?
The Cold War hangover is part of it: the discipline was purged of the people most likely to build alternatives, and the purge continues through funding structures, publication hierarchies, and what counts as rigorous work. The people with the theoretical tools to design alternative architectures are often not in positions where that work is rewarded or even possible.
The credibility trap compounds this. Alternative systems need to be legible to existing institutions to gain adoption, but legibility tends to domesticate them. Debt-for-nature swaps became legible by mimicking financial instruments — which gave them reach in the creditor world but constrained what they could accomplish on the ground. Rights of nature gained constitutional standing in Ecuador by being framed in legal language compatible with existing jurisprudence — but that framing has made them difficult to enforce against extractive interests that also operate through legal language. The tools of legibility are also the tools of capture.
The coalition problem is structural: those with the most to gain from transformation — communities bearing the costs of extraction — have the least institutional leverage. Those with leverage — creditor governments, international financial institutions, multinational corporations — have interests in the current system. Breaking this requires designing for genuine mutual benefit rather than redistribution alone. Creditors need something from the alternative architecture — reduced default risk, reputational value, a hedge against ecological collapse — or they will simply refuse to engage. This is uncomfortable but real.
The measurement bootstrapping problem may be the deepest: you cannot use the old system’s metrics to prove the value of the new one, because those metrics were designed to make the new system invisible. GDP cannot measure the value of care work, community resilience, or ecological restoration — not because these things are unmeasurable, but because GDP was built to track something else. Demonstrating the value of alternative metrics requires institutional credibility, which requires demonstrating value, which requires metrics. There is no clever solution to this circularity. There is only patient parallel construction — building the alternative measurement infrastructure while simultaneously building the institutional relationships that give it standing.
And there is the fragmentation problem: the most important gap may not be the absence of alternatives but the absence of connections between them. Ecuador’s constitutional framework, Bolivia’s vivir bien, Zapatista governance structures, regional monetary experiments, debt-for-nature mechanisms, emerging wellbeing metrics — these exist as islands. The work of connection — building translation layers, identifying interoperabilities, creating the architecture that allows these experiments to reinforce each other — is different from the work of critique and different from the work of inventing new mechanisms. It is, in a sense, infrastructure work: unglamorous, technically demanding, and invisible when it functions well.
One complication deserves honest acknowledgment: the Zapatistas have explicitly refused to scale or connect with state-level governance. Their autonomy is not a prototype waiting to be integrated into a global architecture; it is a political choice to remain outside such architectures. Not every existing alternative wants to be connected, and a framework that treats them all as fragments of a system-in-waiting risks reproducing the same universalizing logic it claims to oppose. The connective work has to respect refusal as a legitimate position, which means the architecture cannot be totalizing. It has to work with the pieces that choose to participate, and leave space for those that don’t.
VI. Two Tasks, Neither Sufficient Alone
Kvangraven ends her conversation with Mattei by describing the coalitions she is building — unions, D-Econ, alternative reading lists, public communication. She frames decolonizing economics as a political project that aims to disrupt existing power structures. She is right. And the work she describes is paradigm-level work — the highest leverage point in any system.
But paradigm disruption creates a space that needs to be filled. If architectural work does not happen in parallel, existing power fills the vacuum with familiar forms. This is not a criticism of the people doing the paradigm work. It is an observation about what happens when paradigm shifts succeed without institutional infrastructure to receive them. The Soviet Union had a paradigm critique of capitalism. What it lacked was an institutional architecture that could function without reproducing the dynamics it opposed.
The decolonial project and the systems-architectural project need each other. The critique creates the intellectual and political space in which alternatives become thinkable. The architecture attempts to make them operational. Neither has a master frame that encompasses the other. Neither is sufficient alone.
The pieces of an alternative already exist — in constitutional frameworks, in community governance structures, in regional monetary experiments, in measurement systems under development, in the epistemic infrastructure that the decolonial movement has built. What is missing is the connective tissue: the translation layers, the governance architectures, the verification systems, and the political relationships that would allow these pieces to function as something more than isolated experiments.
This essay is an attempt to name the connection problem. The Global Governance Frameworks project and its Sovereign Debt Transformation Protocol are an attempt to work on it. Both are incomplete. Both require collaboration with people whose work and whose lives are closer to these questions than mine.
The question this essay leaves open is not rhetorical, and it is not addressed to one side or the other. It is addressed to both:
What would it take for the people naming the disease and the people designing the replacement organ to find each other — and trust each other enough to work on the connective tissue together?