Informal Economies Are Driving Climate Action — Why They’re Essential to a Just Transition by Enna Uwaifo

Hi! My name is Enna Uwaifo, I am currently self-employed as a consultant, researcher, speaker and writer. I also founded the Intersectional Environmentalist Collective UK (The IE Collective UK) in 2024, after completing my MSc Global Development and Environment at the University of Bristol. For my master's dissertation, I travelled to Accra, Ghana and explored the business of one of the world’s biggest open-air second-hand fashion markets, Kantamanto market. I conducted ethnographic research to better understand the textile waste issue being increasingly reported in the global south. I educate and mentor young people in South East London on the sustainability issues in fast-fashion through the case study of Kantamanto market to ensure an interdisciplinary approach to exploring environmental issues through creative digital product ideation, environmentalism and global development.

In post-Brexit Britain, the design of global trade is up for grabs. We know that climate change and environmental crises are hitting Black and Global Majority communities the hardest.

Black interventionism

Being a British-Nigerian, “Black” environmentalist can be deemed “neeky” or “uncool.” It was within my own community that I first announced this aspect of myself. Not only is it an unclear and uncertain career path, but it is also a sector whose mainstream has historically excluded Black people from working within. I am still developing the vocabulary to navigate the increasingly complex landscape of environmental policy.

The European Union (EU) is a policy-making regime that serves as a beacon of Western European-led solutionism and is currently promoting a version of Western environmentalism that excludes those who do not conform to it.  Western European forms of environmentalism that can be considered by many as racist, technocratic, bureaucratic, exclusionary and extractivist in itself.

In the West, when tools are not needed, they are created anyway. This is the difference between invention and nature-based solutions, where externalisation is privileged over embodiment.

There is an issue in Western systems of creating problems and developing new tools and frameworks to address them, rather than mobilising collective cultural responses to prevent problems in the first place. This requires the transfer of power and resources to communities who have long dealt with these challenges and respecting lived experience as its own expertise.

Climate change as a truth teller

This Western-led model of development has prioritised short-term profits, global inequality, and resource extraction, while simultaneously dismissing Indigenous and African knowledge systems that have long been more in tune with sustainability, resource management, and circular economies. Climate change is not only a consequence of these systems; it’s their indictment.

Mainstream Black movements' challenge to White Supremacy up until this point has focused on the ill-treatment of Black populations, from enslavement, colonialism, criminal justice and the civil rights movement. There have been Black environmentalists, of course, but it is far from the most mainstream form of Black resistance to White Supremacy. This version can often focus on the morality of subjugation.

The (Intersectional Environmentalist) IE Collective UK, rooted in the British Afro-diasporic experience, establishes post-corporate leadership. Meaning our edge is our corporate experience in ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance). We believe that decolonial thought is necessary to transform supply chains and unlock truly sustainable innovation. There is no space for this lens in traditional corporate sustainability. However, post-corporate also contests charity models as a solution, as we do not believe our communities should be aid dependent, and there needs to be much more scope for wide-scale investment. Afro-descendant leadership to transform the ways we live globally to improve ecosystem literacy, resource management, and build up sustainable design and circular economies.

This is about connecting the Black experience to the larger issue of White supremacy being a highly inefficient system of resource management that is not designed to fix the ecological problems, but to create them.

Regenerative systems do not need to be designed; they already exist, and are underinvested in through investment logics that privilege White men. In an ecological crisis, there are limited ways to have a vote of no confidence in this investment logic, even though we all share the earth and should have this right. Resource management investment needs to be diversified to bring the Earth into balance.

In the case of textile waste, which is the area of research for which I am best known, we need to invest in and foster cultures of circularity, such as the Kantamanto market in Accra, Ghana.

The EU’s New Circular Economy Plan

“The New Circular Economy Action Plan, set out in the communication of the Commission of 11 March 2020, further stresses the need for action to ensure that shipments of waste for re-use and recycling in the Union are facilitated, that the Union does not export its waste challenges to third countries and that illegal shipments of waste are better addressed.”

Reinvestment would signal a genuine effort to integrate these economies into the EU’s New Circular Economy Plan and Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles. Instead, this policy reflects benevolent exclusion, appearing to address waste issues while maintaining the marginalisation of the Global South. What’s missing is true accountability and a balanced budget. More critically, informal economies that have long managed post-consumer waste are not being recognised as legitimate waste management suppliers within the EU’s value chain. Instead, they are reductively labelled as “third countries”—a term that is both outdated and misleading.

This is a clear example of inefficient design thinking. Instead of investing in the waste management supplier communities that have managed the EU’s waste for decades, their labour and knowledge systems are dismissed, and this is packaged as progress rather than strategic underinvestment. When the EU "knows best," without the cultural validity to back it up, a new problem is inevitably created.


This is how White supremacy culture sustains itself in real-time: it outsources its crises to marginalised communities, withholds investment for the management of these crises, and then withdraws once the optics turn unfavourable. This cycle continuously generates new environmental, social, and ethical problems. The most effective strategy—direct investment in Black and Global Majority leadership for their knowledge systems in building circular economies—is deliberately ignored, even in supposedly progressive circular economy policy.

This is why I have centred the business I am creating around specifically the EU’s new Corporate Sustainability Responsibility Directive (CSRD) ESRS E5, which focuses on the circular economy, as Kantamanto market needs to gain full recognition by large fashion brands as a circular business community in their post-consumer value chain. Not even the corporate sustainability space should be ignored in validating informal markets as key areas for circular economy experts to reinvest in.

We need to develop a Just Transition Policy Principle.

Just Transition Investment Policy Principle is a mechanism to ensure the recognition of existing systems built by indigenous and the global majority communities. It is about ensuring that environmental policy is co-created with communities through investing in environmental sustainability that more so adapts existing systems rather than destroys them.

Informal economies, such as Kantamanto Market, have developed their own sustainable systems to manage post-consumer textiles out of necessity. These communities' resilience, driven by necessity, led them to build their own sustainable systems for managing post-consumer textiles.

The resilience of these communities is remarkable—they've used their expertise to create economic opportunities, educate their children, and support their families in ways that larger, formalised systems often fail to provide. They have an in-depth understanding of circular economies, even if they aren’t formally recognised as such.

Markets like Kantamanto are often dismissed because they are "informal" and do not adhere to traditional, Western standards of business practice. Yet, they have been managing the waste of global corporations for decades and done so effectively. The textile waste challenges you see are largely because poor communities often pay for second-hand fashion to be imported.

They were not given investment by the corporate fashion world for textile waste management. Kantamanto market is defined as a “textile waste dump” in the West. It serves as an economic devaluation driven by the media and environmental charity sector, as it does not accurately explain why the textile waste crisis emerged.

It is not defined by the business community’s capacity to circularly recycle 100 million pieces of second-hand clothing in four-month cycles, which is the true role they play in the global fashion trade. In comparison, it took ThredUp 11 years to recirculate 100 million garments between 2019 and 2020.

They provide an unrecognised service to the global fashion industry and international consumers. Every aspect of Western environmentalism refuses to recognise the services these markets provide by failing to make the argument for investment in them, thereby instituting what I term a Just Transition Investment Policy Principle.

This is White Supremacy culture in action, even when our livelihoods on the planet are at stake.