Geopolitics at the Edge: Solarpunk, Cyberpunk, and the Fall of Carbon AidPaul MurphyVitalism Civic Innovation
On January 20, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid.” Within days, over 90% of USAID’s foreign aid contracts were suspended, freezing more than $60 billion in global assistance. For an institution founded by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 as a cornerstone of liberal internationalism, the abrupt rollback of USAID is not simply a budgetary shift. It is a geopolitical rupture—a marker of the collapse of a legacy aid model built on conditionality, donor-state paternalism, and the hegemony of fossil-fueled geopolitics.
This piece is directed toward policymakers, researchers, and institutions engaged in shaping the future of international development. As multilateral cooperation is redefined, this article offers a speculative but grounded framework for transitioning from legacy carbon-based aid systems to territorial digital sovereignty. It encourages institutional adaptation by reframing how development research, governance, and infrastructure intersect in a post-USAID landscape.
More importantly, in a moment when BRICS+ countries are not only challenging the US-led world order but the G20 cannibalizes itself, it signals the rise of a new phase in global cooperation—one that must localize the information economy, confront post-suburbia’s housing crisis, and reduce dependency on automobiles and industrial agriculture, all while pursuing digital sovereignty as a foundation for equitable collaboration.
To applied experts of Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy (2009), fossil fuels shaped not only economies but governance structures. The control of oil pipelines and tankers enabled both authoritarian stability and the managed liberalism of post-war democracies. That era is ending—not just due to climate realities, but due to shifts in energy markets, technologies, and forms of international alignment. In 2008, Jeff Rubin, former chief economist of CIBC, argued that transportation and energy costs would soon dwarf the efficiencies of global supply chains enabled by WTO tariff reductions. Alberto Magnaghi, who passed away in 2023, extended this logic: urbanization is reversible, and a post-oil society will require bioregionalism (a model of place-based sustainability that integrates food, energy, and governance systems)—where villages, not megacities, offer the most resilient model of service delivery and civic identity.
The convergence of food, energy, and information crises creates volatility. The Yellow Vest protests (2018–2020), the EU farmers’ uprisings (2023–2024), and India’s farmers’ movement (2020–2021) reveal social tipping points triggered by centralized development models. UN-Habitat’s “New Urban Agenda” assumes that 95% of urban growth will occur in the developing world by 2035, 70% of which will be in informal settlements. With 80% of the world’s rural population in Asia and Africa—and, according to the World Bank, 2.6 billion people in 2025 still unconnected to the internet—hyper-urbanization looks less like a forecast and more like a policy failure. A new logic must embrace place-based strategies capable of reducing geopolitical tension while delivering food sovereignty and digital access.
In response to the UN’s city-centric paradigm, China has embedded regional planning into its legal and institutional framework. The 2021 Rural Revitalization Promotion Law, based on a 2018 strategy, prioritizes food resilience, cultural heritage, and ecological governance. China is reorienting its development from top-down megaprojects to corridor-based rural advancement, backed by smart village programs. Unlike China’s strategic alignment of domestic and global DPI policy, Canada’s approach has been more fragmented. Canada’s 2019 creation of a Minister of Rural Economic Development mirrored this shift but lacked China’s policy integration. Canada’s broadband-first approach, while a start, is insufficient without embedded planning across education, agriculture, health, and data infrastructure.
Contrary to infrastructure built on fossil-fuel surplus, Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI)—a term describing the foundational systems that enable public service delivery through digital identity, payments, and data exchange—offers modular, scalable systems for delivering services such as healthcare, education, and identity verification, without relying on city density. DPI decouples the provision of quality services from population concentration, thereby enabling a future in which rural living is not only viable but preferable. China’s investment in UN agencies like the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), International Telecommunications Union (ITU), International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), and United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO)—where it holds directorships in 2025—suggests that its foreign policy is becoming aligned with its domestic territorial development model. Combined with its 60% control of rare earth production, China is crafting the physical infrastructure of a new post-carbon global order.
Information governance is the defining terrain of post-carbon geopolitics. As the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) monitors public waste and BRICS+ builds counter-hegemonic development architectures, the fault line is not between democracy and authoritarianism, but between trust, transparency, and traceability. Digital exclusion is severe: over 40% of the world lacks legal ID, cutting millions off from essential services. At the same time, digitization reinforces intellectual property regimes dominated by China, the U.S., and Europe, sidelining growth markets in Africa, Asia, and South America. Urban economies remain tethered to industrial agriculture, illustrated by the FAO’s controversial partnership with CropLife—an agrochemical lobby closely tied to petrochemical conglomerates—undermining scientific neutrality.
And yet, a Solarpunk alternative emerges. Open-source technologies like Linux (which powers 98% of internet servers), Creative Commons licensing, explainable AI, the Open Library by the Internet Archive, and Solid—a web decentralization initiative led by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web—offer tangible models for distributed autonomy, digital commons, and transparent governance. Together, they represent a shift away from extractive, surveillance-based architectures toward systems grounded in cooperation and sovereignty.
What remains essential in the move from carbon capitalism to an information society is a new organizing principle for planetary interdependence. As articulated by Vasilis Kostakis, cosmolocalism (a design philosophy where “what is light should be global and shared, what is heavy should be local”) suggests that data, identity, and education must become open-access public goods, while food, energy, and housing are delivered through regional planning. The Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth (1972) warned of the unsustainability of unchecked expansion. Ignoring it has led us to a new choice: drift into Yanis Varoufakis’s Technofeudalism (2023), or operationalize DPI and cosmolocal ethics to construct a Solarpunk future.
As Lewis Mumford once observed, cities should be designed for people—not machines or capital. In the information age, that principle translates to Vince Cerf’s idea of a People-Centered Internet and the demand for human-scale, distributed infrastructure. But in an era of food and energy volatility, and submarine cable tensions between BRICS+ and the Five Eyes alliance—through which 99% of global data flows—it is no longer the sprawling metropolis but the decentralized rural region that offers a viable path forward. While the 15,000 km French-Chinese PEACE cable connecting Europe, Africa, and Asia seeks to bridge digital divides, a new model of international cooperation is needed—one that delivers high-quality services without depending on urban density.
Initiatives like Small Farm Cities in Malawi, the Smart Village Movement in India, the Connected Hubs program across Ireland, and Edge Cities around the world hint at what’s possible. However, many remain disconnected from mainstream planning and institutional backing. The Charter Cities model, despite good intentions, often repeats the logic of the “urban growth monster”—replicating privatized technocratic governance rather than rethinking public service delivery. The clash is ultimately civilizational: Solarpunk vs. Cyberpunk. One envisions decentralized cooperation, open access, and rooted regeneration; the other, walled cities, closed systems, and digital serfdom.
For development stakeholders, DPI must be seen not as a technical fix, but as a new architecture of governance. Regional institutions should prioritize interoperable ID systems, open data platforms, and rural connectivity strategies scalable across bioregions. Universities, development agencies, and multilateral banks must reorient funding toward territorial innovation labs—co-designed with local institutions and rooted in digital commons frameworks. Organizational innovation lies not in inherited systems but in what David McNair calls Frugal Multilateralism, offering a counter-narrative to Érick Duchesne’s Competitive Authoritarianism.
To avoid collapse, we must enshrine two rights across global institutions: the Right to Be Rural and the Right to Communicate. These form the foundation for an ecological civilization—a future grounded in territorial intelligence and interoperable infrastructure. This is not just a policy agenda; it is the rebirth of development itself.
SIDEBAR: Solarpunk vs. Cyberpunk—Two Paths for Global Development Solarpunk CyberpunkGovernance Open, participatory, community-based Centralized, corporate or technocraticTechnology Transparent, explainable, open-source Proprietary, opaque, surveillance-orientedInfrastructure Distributed and place-based (cosmolocal) Urban-centric and gatedInformation Open access, commons-based Paywalled, monopolizedEcology Regenerative, food/energy sovereignty Extractive, fossil-fuel dependentHuman Rights Right to Be Rural + Right to Communicate Right to Urban, Data colonialism, platform monopolies Vision Decentralized cooperation, ecological resilience Digital feudalism, gated governance.
SIDEBAR: Solarpunk vs. Cyberpunk—Two Paths for Global Development
| Solarpunk | Cyberpunk |
Governance | Open, participatory, community-based | Centralized, corporate or technocratic |
Technology | Transparent, explainable, open-source | Proprietary, opaque, surveillance-oriented |
Infrastructure | Distributed and place-based (cosmolocal) | Urban-centric and gated |
Information | Open access, commons-based | Paywalled, monopolized |
Ecology | Regenerative, food/energy sovereignty | Extractive, fossil-fuel dependent |
Human Rights | Right to Be Rural + Right to Communicate | Right to Urban, Data colonialism, platform monopolies |
Vision | Decentralized cooperation, ecological resilience | Digital feudalism, gated governance |