At a moment marked by the climate crisis, energy shocks, and renewed global conflict, economists, ministers, and academics gathered in Bogotá to discuss the construction of an alternative international economic order. The event was framed around the idea of economía para la vida (“economy for life”), an economy oriented around human life and dignity rather than profit and capital.
Co-organized by the Colombian Ministry of Education, the Colombian think tank Vida, and Progressive International, the forum brought together heterodox voices to debate climate and the energy transition, industrial policy and labor, and technology and innovation.
The event built on a series of gatherings convened by the Progressive International beginning in 2024 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the New International Economic Order (NIEO). The NIEO was a program of reforms aimed at restructuring trade, debt, technology transfer, and resource sovereignty that was first advanced by a coalition of countries from Africa, Asia, and Latin America known as the Group of 77 (G77) and adopted by the UN in 1974. It emerged from the broader crisis of postcolonial development, along with the political opening created by OPEC’s success in exerting leverage over the west.
The original initiative faltered with the onset of the debt crisis in the early 1980s, the rise of neoliberal governments in the United States and Europe, and contradictions within the G77 itself. The participants in Bogotá insisted that the revival of the NIEO was not a matter of nostalgia but rather a useful historical reference point and a model for confronting the contemporary crisis, which they identified as stemming from both the fractured international order and the structural crisis of neoliberalism.
There Is Always an Alternative
In addition to diagnosing the contradictions of the moment, the conference was in large part dedicated to practical questions of how countries could shift their position in the global economy. Fadhel Kaboub, Professor of Economics at Denison University, argued that the global economic architecture is still fundamentally colonial, with the Global South exporting cheap raw materials and importing manufactured goods. This framework has kept developing countries locked in an unfavorable position within the international division of labor. Kaboub stressed that this hierarchy could not be transcended alone. Without greater South-South cooperation and regional integration, individual national strategies would fail to generate economies of scale and the coordination needed to transcend the colonial structures that continue to characterize the global economy.
Without greater South-South cooperation and regional integration, individual national strategies would fail to generate economies of scale and the coordination needed to transcend the colonial structures that continue to characterize the global economy.
Industrial policy emerged as a central theme, reflecting a recent revival of the concept after decades in which state-led planning and intervention were dismissed as inefficient and incompatible with the Washington Consensus. The use of such policies has emerged as a key mechanism for countries in the global south to pursue a green transition in ways that do not create new forms of dependency. Simon Gómez-Azza, the director of Vida, argued for an approach to industrial policy that incorporated popular and peasant economies, and was linked to agrarian reform and the energy transition.
Isabella Weber, a professor of economics at University of Massachusetts Amherst, argued that the most urgent global challenges is how to allocate scarce resources during supply shocks, such as the current disruption to energy flows caused by restricted passage through the Strait of Hormuz due to the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. If left entirely to market pricing, poorer countries are likely to be priced out by wealthier countries, with supply shortfalls cascading through the societies that are least able to bear the costs—as occurred during the fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic, a crisis of equal scale, Weber has argued.
As a concrete alternative to the volatility and uncertainty of market-driven dynamics, Weber proposed the creation of an oil buyers’ club that would set a price ceiling and floor and coordinate allocation in proportion to prewar import levels. Such a mechanism would allow countries in the Global South to act collectively against the worst effects of the energy crisis, while also benefiting exporting countries through greater price predictability.
This proposal carries broader significance. Even modest interventions, she explained, mattered because they demonstrate that there are always alternatives to what she described as the market’s “Darwinian logic.” Moreover, organizations like an oil buyers club, would provide a model for future multilateral efforts through mechanisms like buffer stocks to stabilize the price of commodities, whose volatility disproportionately harms countries in the Global South.
The Colombian Laboratory
It was no coincidence that the forum was held in Bogotá. Under the current government of left-wing President Gustavo Petro, Colombia has emerged as an important site for debates over alternatives to neoliberal orthodoxy. Throughout the three days, participants repeatedly described the country as a laboratory for many of the ideas under discussion.
In the past year, Colombia has taken steps once considered politically risky for a country in the Global South. In late 2025, Colombia canceled its Flexible Credit Line—a pre-approved line of credit that can be drawn upon without conditionality—and paid off the $5.4 billion that it had borrowed from the IMF during the pandemic era. The moves signaled a political shift away from the Washington-based institution, and also confidence in the stability of the economy and strength of the country’s foreign reserves.
In the past year, Colombia has taken steps once considered politically risky for a country in the Global South.
Then, in March, Petro announced that Colombia would withdraw from an arbitration system that allows corporations to sue countries for lost profits in private courts, a system known as Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS). While countries including Bolivia and Ecuador exited ISDS during the Pink Tide era, Colombia’s decision comes amidst renewed calls from economists and legal scholars for countries to leave the system, arguing that it can impede the government’s ability to pursue climate and social policy.
These decisions, along with efforts to renegotiate and cancel free trade deals over humanitarian concerns, demonstrate that concrete steps can be taken to reclaim sovereignty and chart economic policy outside of the once-dominant logic of the Washington Consensus.
Colombia’s role as a testing ground has perhaps been most clearly visible in its climate policy, where Petro has pursued a green transition and launched a broader critique of extractivism. The government has banned new contracts for hydrocarbon exploration and is moving towards phasing out existing projects like the open-pit Cerrejón coal mine—moves which have sparked debate about how the shift away from fossil fuel dependence can be reconciled with development and fiscal stability. These questions were at the center of discussions at another recent international summit hosted in Colombia, the historic Just Transition Conference in Santa Marta.
Putting Radical Ideas to the Test
In the closing session of the forum, Colombia’s Minister of Finance and Public Credit German Ávila offered “Five Theses” drawn from Colombia’s recent experience to illustrate the government’s challenge to orthodox economic thinking. Markets, inequality, and measures of economic growth, he argued, were not neutral or natural, but rather the outcome of political decisions about how resources were distributed and what sectors were prioritized.For Ávila, ideas around markets, inequality, and measures of economic growth are political constructions that can be reshaped through policy, which would require a more active role for the state in productive development and a redefinition of social spending as investment in national development.
Ávila similarly rejected the idea that inequality and wealth concentration are the inevitable side effects of growth or part of a transitory phase of development. He also questioned the centrality of GDP as a measure of economic success, arguing that the more important question was not simply how much an economy grows but how much that growth improves citizens’ well-being.
One of the strongest arguments to emerge from both Ávila’s theses and Colombia’s recent experience is that monetary policy is not neutral.
One of the strongest arguments to emerge from both Ávila’s theses and Colombia’s recent experience is that monetary policy is not neutral. Interest rates, wage policy, and inflation targets distribute costs and benefits across society, benefiting some sectors over others. Or, as Ávila put it, monetary policy is “a distributive decision disguised as a technocratic one.”
Wage policy has been one of the clearest examples of Colombia’s break with neoliberal orthodoxy. Describing wages as both an instrument of redistribution and a tool for poverty reduction, Ávila pointed to the Colombian government’s decision to raise the minimum wage by 23 percent for 2025 to what it calls a “living wage.” In doing so, the Petro administration has made a clear policy choice to prioritize wages over inflation concerns, seeking to reverse decades of the working class’s declining purchasing and bargaining power.
The consequences of this decision have defied macroeconomic expectations. Against the prevailing logic neoliberal logic, the historic wage hike has not been a driver of inflation and unemployment has fallen to a record low of 8 percent.
The wage hike’s success, and the original resistance to it, emboldened the government to go further. Their position brought the Petro administration in direct conflict with Colombia’s Central Bank, which raised interest rates repeatedly in early 2025 in an attempt to bring inflation towards the mandated 3 percent target. Petro and his allies have argued that the Bank’s policy favors the financial sector while making credit more expensive, slowing consumption and investment. The conflict peaked at the end of March when Ávila walked out of a Central Bank board meeting, sparking debate over the bank’s independence and the administration’s broader economic strategy.
Putting the state’s institutions to work for the people has been more than economically sound; it has also been politically popular. Since defying institutional impediments and pursuing his reform agenda through popular mobilizations and decrees, Gustavo Petro has experienced his highest approval ratings. Ivan Cepeda, the candidate representing the left-wing coalition Pacto Histórico in the upcoming presidential race, has vowed to continue these transformations if elected. His challengers from the right have offered visions for the economy based on Javier Milei’s Argentina, or a return to neoliberalism underpinned by a security strategy closely tied to the United States in a so-called Plan Colombia 2.0.
Politics is Back
The fact that Colombia’s economic model is a question in the upcoming elections is remarkable given that the country’s economic policy has long been defined by a technocratic consensus and commitment to macroeconomic orthodoxy across party lines.
Both the conference in Bogotá and the Colombian experience more generally demonstrate that questions related to trade, finance, energy, and development that were long treated as settled are reopened for debate and are again fields of political contestation. As the participants in Bogotá emphasized, the task of constructing a New International Economic Order, or an Economía para la vida, begins with concrete policies that show that there is always an alternative.
Abigail Kret is an artist and writer whose work focuses on the history of left-wing movements in the late 20th century.