Profile
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.
Degrees Held
The New School, Milano School of Policy, Management, and Environment, New York
PhD in Public Policy (fields of study: International Political Economy and Critical Theories)
London School of Economics, Development Studies Institute, London
MSc in Development Economics with Distinction
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
BSc in Political Science and BA in Journalism
Jakarta International School, Jakarta, Indonesia
International Baccalaureate Diploma
Recent Publications
Journal articles
(Forthcoming January 2026; peer review completed) Muchhala, Bhumika. “Obligations Beyond Borders? Applying the Maastricht Principles on Extraterritorial Obligations to address international monetary tightening spillovers in the gendered debt crisis in Pakistan.” Feminist Economics, Special issue: Gendering the Debt Crisis.
(Forthcoming February 2026; peer review completed) Muchhala, Bhumika. “From Financial Crisis to Fiscal Discipline: Indonesia’s political economy transition from the 1997 Asian financial crisis to 2023.” Third World Quarterly, Special issue: Decolonizing Epistemology: Intellectual Imperialism and the Coloniality of Knowledge.
Muchhala, Bhumika and Andrea Guillem. 2022. “Gendered austerity in Ecuador: Channels through which women absorb and resist public spending cuts.” Gender and Development, Vol 30, No 1-2: 283-309.
Muchhala, Bhumika. 2022. “The Structural Power of the State-Finance Nexus.” Development, Vol 65: 124–135. Dempsey,
Jessica, Bigger, Patrick, Irvine-Broque, Audrey and Bhumika Muchhala. 2022. “Biodiversity targets will not be met without debt and tax justice.” Nature Ecology & Evolution, Vol 6: 237–239.
Sakiko Fukuda-Parr and Bhumika Muchhala. 2020. The Southern Origins of Sustainable Development: Ideas, actors, aspirations. World Development, Vol 126: 104-116.
Muchhala, Bhumika and Mitu Sengupta. 2014. A Déjà Vu Agenda or a Development Agenda? Economic & Political Weekly, Vol 49, No 46: 2814-2822.
Muchhala, Bhumika. 2012. Barricades to Gender Equity in the International Financial Architecture. Development, 55(3): 280-287.
Book chapters
(Forthcoming March 2026). Muchhala, Bhumika. “Colonial Financial Architecture: Hierarchy, drain and discipline through currencies, debt and austerity,” in The Handbook for Decolonizing International Affairs. Routledge: New York.
(Forthcoming March 2026). Muchhala, Bhumika. “Epistemic Empire: The making of economic coloniality in global governance and pathways toward epistemic delinking,” in The Handbook for Decolonizing International Affairs. Routledge: New York.
(Forthcoming January 2026). Muchhala, Bhumika. “Refocusing Debt Within the Climate Crisis: The colonial origins, currency hierarchy, and epistemic foundations of debt distress in the global South” in The Sage Handbook of Eco-Social Political Economy, Ed. Bell, Karen. Sage: London.
Muchhala, Bhumika. 2025. “Critical Political Economy Approaches: Insights on financialization from dependency thinking,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Decoloniality in Asia, Eds. Maria Sanchez, Phoebe, Imbong, Regletto Aldrich D., Chew, Matthew Ming-Tak and Caroline Schoepf. Palgrave Asia: Singapore.
Muchhala, Bhumika. 2024. “An Internationalist and Feminist Global Green New Deal,” in Righting the Economy: Towards a People's Recovery from Economic and Environmental Crisis, Eds. Leite, Marianna and Matti Kohonen. Agenda Publishing: Newcastle, UK.
Muchhala, Bhumika. 2022. “Covid-19 reveals everything: Rethinking the international financial architecture for crisis resilience” in Rethinking Global Economic Policy: Proposals on Resilience, Rights and Equity for the Global South, Eds. Yu, Vice and Sengupta, Ranja. Third World Network: Penang.
Edited book
Muchhala, Bhumika, Ed. 2007. Ten Years After: Revisiting the Asian financial crisis. Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars: Washington, D.C.
Research Interests
Critical international political economy; International financial subordination; Dependency theory; World systems analysis; Critical theory; Anti-colonial histories and politics; Decolonization movements; Decoloniality; Feminist theories of social reproduction and feminist political economy; Radical political ecology; Climate and environmental policy and politics; Ecological imperialism; Racial capitalism; Neocolonialism; Subaltern theories; Social movements; Transnational feminist organizing.