Samantha Suppiah and B. Lorraine Smith
Insider Insights: A People’s History of the IMF–World Bank
The Bartlett Pan-African Indigenist Collective shares Insider Insights by Samantha Suppiah and B. Lorraine Smith
Insider Insights: A People’s History of the IMF–World Bank. Image created by Galila Khougali
ABOUT
This recorded conversation, available on Possible Futures in March 2024, brings together Samantha Suppiah and former sustainability consultant B. Lorraine Smith.
Suppiah delivers a compelling “people’s history” of the IMF and World Bank, tracing how these Bretton Woods institutions evolved from colonial finance structures into today’s global debt enforcers. She reveals how structural adjustment, austerity, and extractive lending continue to harm communities in the Global South. In the second half, Smith shares insights from her work in corporate sustainability, critiquing the ESG industry’s disconnect from lived ecological and social realities. She introduces her alternative framework, Matereality, which grounds responsibility in ecological thresholds and relational accountability, not investor-led metrics.
Together, the speakers call for radically rethinking financial “responsibility” from local areas, centring justice, land, and lived experience.
ABOUT
This reference was recommended by the Bartlett Pan-African Indigenist Collective.
The Collective is a space for critical dialogue, activism, and scholarship that foregrounds Pan-African Indigenist ways of knowing, being, and creating. Formed by members of the Bartlett community dedicated to uplifting the voices, knowledge, and cultural legacies of people of African heritage and their respective Indigenous communities and lands, it aims to challenge colonial legacies and inspire transformation within institutional structures, research and curricula. By integrating creative and scholarly practices, the Collective works to restore narratives that have been silenced or misrepresented. Their work advances decolonial efforts in higher education by creating inclusive spaces and centring diverse African knowledge systems. Bartlett Alternative recognises the Collective’s vital contribution to broadening intellectual and cultural horizons through radical inclusivity and exclusivity, and thanks them for sharing resources that foreground lived experience, land-based knowledge systems, and epistemic justice.
Department Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment
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