Bhumika Muchhala

Bhumika Muchhala is a critical feminist political economist and theorist whose work spans advocacy, research, and movement building in the fields of international financial architecture, feminist economics, and decolonial futures. She serves as a Senior Advisor with the Third World Network and as a Lecturer in the Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management (EPSM) Program at The New School. Her teaching portfolio includes Research as Accompaniment: Scholar-Activist Methodologies; Critical Political Economy and Ecology: From Extraction–Accumulation to Regeneration–Reparation; and Global Environmental Policy and Politics. Her transdisciplinary scholarship integrates international political economy, feminist theory, political ecology, and critical traditions within dependency theory, world-systems analysis, anticolonial thought, and decoloniality.

Dr. Muchhala’s research examines economic and financial subordination through the political economy of sovereign debt, austerity and financialization in the Global South. She interrogates the complex dynamics of neoliberal capitalism in the current era through intersectional analyses of dependency, decolonial, and social reproduction theories. Her work seeks to reveal prevailing logics and trace the historical genealogy of structural, gendered, and epistemic power in order to unsettle the foundations of global inequality. In her research methodology, she engages with communities across the Global South experiencing and resisting economic austerity and financialization by formulating social democratic alternatives across policy and politics.

Her recent publications (2022-2025) further examine the interrelation between climate reparations and sovereign debt through the colonial origins and epistemic roots of sovereign debt; international financial subordination through currency hierarchies and financial discipline; the gendered dimensions of debt crises in Sri Lanka and Pakistan; the epistemic foundations of neoliberalism in global governance; the counter-hegemonic origins of sustainability in the Global South; and, possible pathways of epistemic delinking to decolonize economic assumptions. She has also articulated propositional principles and analysis for a decolonial and feminist Global Green New Deal as a cross-border worldmaking and collective initiative.

With over two decades of experience in global economic and climate justice movements, Dr. Muchhala has held leadership roles in strategic advocacy, research, and political education initiatives. Through her role as senior advisor and strategist for the Third World Network, she has been actively involved in transnational social movements and global coalitions such as the End Austerity Network, Debt for Climate, and various initiatives focused on systemic reform of the international economic architecture.

She advises policymakers and negotiators from the Global South within United Nations conference negotiations, including the General Assembly, the Sustainable Development Goals process, the Financing for Development conferences, the World Conference on the Global Financial Crisis, and numerous resolutions on reforming the international financial architecture and addressing sovereign debt. Her consultancy and advisory engagements include work with the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Development, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and UN Women. She has also reviewed flagship reports for international research and advocacy organizations such as Oxfam and the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems. Currently, she serves as a member of the Independent Expert Group on Just Transition for the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Advisory Group on Sovereign Debt and Colonial Reparations at Debt Justice.