Decolonising global higher education: climate justice and the future of international academic partnerships

This conceptual, desk-based paper examines how the internationalisation of higher education can be reshaped through decolonisation and climate justice to rethink the ethics of international academic partnerships. It argues that current approaches to internationalisation remain rooted in Euro-American ways of knowing and long-standing colonial patterns that sideline knowledge from the Global South and Indigenous communities. International student mobility now involves around seven million students, yet almost two-thirds still come from high- or upper middle-income countries, and the Global North continues to receive most of them, reinforcing unequal flows of people, ideas and resources. At the same time, universities in climate‑vulnerable regions remain under-represented in mobility schemes and under-funded in research, while North–South partnerships often maintain inequalities in who sets agendas, controls funding and claims authorship. In response, the paper develops a decolonial, cosmopolitan and climate‑just framework for internationalisation that highlights diverse ways of knowing, mutual responsibility and shared planetary futures, and calls for a fairer distribution of decision-making power that prioritises institutions in climate-affected contexts. It ends by outlining principles and practical indicators for “equitable, climate‑just internationalisation” across governance, mobility, curriculum and research collaboration.