Bhumika Muchhala

Bhumika Muchhala is a nonresident fellow at the Global South Policy Hub. She is a political economist with two decades of experience in global economic governance, policy advocacy, and research leadership. She is a Senior Advisor at Third World Network, where she coordinates transnational initiatives on transforming the international financial architecture, with a focus on sovereign debt, fiscal policy, climate financing, and regulatory governance reforms. She advises policymakers and negotiators from the Global South, including in the context of United Nations conferences on Financing for Development, climate change, and a range of other intergovernmental processes and resolutions. Bhumika regularly publishes journal articles, book chapters, op-eds, and briefing papers on issues in international political economy, while also leading global popular and political education initiatives.

Bhumika has served as an expert consultant to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Development, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, UN Women, and regional commissions. She regularly reviews flagship reports for international organizations such as Oxfam and the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems and serves as a member of the Independent Expert Group on Just Transition for the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Dr. Muchhala teaches graduate courses on international political economy and ecology, global governance, and research methodologies at The New School. She has also taught at Rutgers University and has delivered guest lectures and talks at numerous universities worldwide. Her academic research examines economic and financial subordination through the political economy of sovereign debt, austerity, and financialization in the Global South.

She interrogates dynamics within the international political economy of global inequalities through dependency, decolonial, and feminist economic theories and concepts. In her research methodology, she employs mixed research and praxis approaches, combining empirical and literature-based research while also engaging with communities across the Global South and international social movements. Her recent publications (2022–2025) 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 principles and analysis for a decolonial and feminist Global Green New Deal as a cross-border worldmaking and collective initiative.