We are living through the age of polycrises: from the long established liberal international order eating itself alive to the live-streamed violence beamed into our homes and our palms. In grassroots organizing spaces and international policy arenas, there is a pervasive sense of anxiety, overwhelm, and uncertainty.
Despite this, or perhaps because of it, award-winning journalist Natasha Hakimi Zapata’s debut book, Another World Is Possible: Lessons to America from Around the Globe (The New Press, 2025), is a timely intervention. In it, Hakimi Zapata asks us not to despair no matter how dire circumstances may be, and draws examples from around the world to remind us that change is achievable. Through detailed case studies from nine different countries, she tells the stories of committed citizens who have transformed policies in their own countries.
The book may serve as a handbook for all of us, with blueprints for radical policies on housing, education, biodiversity, digital rights, and more, while also acting as a guide and inspiration for the muscular soul work required from us today. Crises, the book seems to say, can be moments of utter destruction, fear and tragedy, but they are also inflection points. Our work, as those who want to change the world for the better, is to hold on, with all the determination we can muster, to the hope that change is possible. To practice in the discipline of hope, as Mariame Kaba would say. Why? Because we have to, and we can take heart in the knowledge that many others have done so before.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Yassmin Abdel-Magied (YAM): Natasha, the scope for the book is global, so how did you go about choosing where you wanted to focus your energies?
Natasha Hakimi Zapata (NHZ): The book comes out of two parts of my life; out of my professional life as a journalist in progressive media in the US for about fifteen years, and from my time living abroad.
I’m from a family of undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Iran. I grew up with this idea that my brothers and I are these little American dreams that my parents had. But as we got older, I started to feel like that American dream was actually more possible in other countries, especially after a health incident regarding my mom. She couldn’t afford health care for much of her life, and so she had untreated diabetes that was only diagnosed at the moment that she was rushed to an emergency room and had her right foot amputated. Having lived in countries with universal health care, like the UK and Portugal and Spain, I knew that other countries do better by their citizens and wanted to investigate how they went about it.
In terms of countries, I wanted to take as global a perspective as possible. I didn’t want to stay just in Scandinavia, which is often the case when Americans talk about more left-wing policies or social democratic solutions. I wanted to show that there are these very effective, scrappy solutions in what some people in the US would consider unlikely places, and that oftentimes these countries emerge as authorities on these subjects. I also wanted to look at policies that had been around for at least ten years so that I had enough data to look at how successful they had truly been.
YAM: I’d like us to focus on these “unlikely countries.” Let’s start with Uruguay, a country that is now at 99 percent renewable energy. What was the catalyst for Uruguay that allowed them to make this big shift?
NHZ: Historically, Uruguay had depended largely on hydroelectric dams and imported fossil fuels for generating its electricity, but for years, it had really struggled, literally, to keep the lights on. As droughts became increasingly severe and more common, due in part to the climate crisis, it was getting so expensive and so difficult to keep the lights on that political leaders from across the spectrum were recognising that something had to be done. Just before 2010, Frente Amplio, a left-wing coalition government, came to power for the second time under President Pepe Mujica. And he decided there was a need for cross-party agreements on key issues in Uruguay, including on their inability to generate enough energy to meet the needs of the country.
YAM: How did they get that cross-party agreement? That’s quite difficult to achieve during the best of times.
NHZ: You said in the best of times, but for Uruguay it was the worst of times. In a lot of the countries I looked at, many policies actually came from moments of crisis in which there was an undeniable need to do something radical. In Uruguay, everyone across the political spectrum agreed it was not sustainable to continue to import fossil fuels. In less than ten years they entirely greened the grid, enabled by long term agreements through which they ensured electricity remained a public good by stipulating that any energy generated by these private companies had to be sold back to the public utility.
YAM: Break down these agreements for us. How were they then able to use them to successfully green the grid? And were there any downsides?
NHZ: The government put out tenders for wind, biomass, and solar generators, and initially, these were largely unsuccessful. But they got kind of lucky in that after the 2008 financial crisis, all of these wind turbine and solar panel companies that were preoccupied with larger economies, like Germany and the UK, had to put those infrastructure projects on pause because these countries no longer had the financial means to continue with them. These same companies then called up Uruguay and said, “Hey, are you still interested?” And Uruguay was in a position to say: “Yes. We have the money, we have the green light, we have these cross-party agreements, and we have a government that is interested in a just green transition. So let’s do it.”
In terms of downsides, the price is the biggest issue. The price of wind, solar and biomass energy has plummeted since the agreements were signed, but they are locked into these long-term agreements. The experts told me it was competitive for the time, and necessary in order to get the investment. Even though there has been criticism, it is still largely seen as a long-term investment that has paid off.
YAM: You quote one CEO as saying it was the first time in his experience “that the public sector outpaced private companies.” What was the key ingredient for making sure that this public sector-driven infrastructure project was more successful than if a bunch of private companies had tried?
NHZ: I’m often baffled, especially in the US, why we have this misconception that private industry does things better and more efficiently and more effectively. Here you have a great example of how the public sector can work effectively and, because it’s publicly owned and accountable to the people of a nation, can also keep their best interests at heart.
YAM: What do you think is a key thing for Americans to understand about what happened in Uruguay?
NHZ: It’s very possible, using the levers we already have in a democracy, to push for these sorts of changes. There was an example in Rhode Island in which the local community came together to push for the state to buy back part of their grid.
I would encourage Americans to think as big as possible, and consider how public ownership over things like utilities could make such a massive difference in our daily lives. We’re losing so much by not transitioning to renewable energy as fast as we can. Uruguay is a great example of how much there is to gain, and how quickly [things could change], if we were to follow their lead.
YAM: Speaking of other parts of the world, not so far away from Uruguay, we have Costa Rica. The real heart of this chapter is Costa Rica’s biodiversity law. Tell us about the journey this law took from conception to implementation.
NHZ: From the 1980s and 1990s, there was a very clear environmental loss happening in Costa Rica, one of the most biodiverse places in the world. It has this incredible geography where it’s a bridge between regions in which unique flora and fauna can thrive. But about 40 percent of the rainforest had been lost by the 1990s.
A key moment came in 1992 with the Rio Convention on Biodiversity, which a few key characters in the Costa Rica biodiversity law story attend, or at least are very aware of. When they come back to their own country, they decide that finding a way to codify a convention like that could be one of the ways to not just protect the biodiversity that remained in Costa Rica, but actually reverse some of the damage that had been done.
So a marine biologist, an environmental lawyer, and a policymaker all meet and start talking about how to adapt the Convention on Biological Diversity for Costa Rica. They decide that Costa Rica needs its own biodiversity law, and this starts a more than decade-long political battle in which the three of them and many other people fight for this.
YAM: What exactly makes this law so unique?
NHZ: It does something quite radical, which is to assert the right of the people of a nation to own their biodiversity. Think about how globalization works, think about how capitalism works. This is why it’s so radical–to say the natural wealth belongs to the people, not to multinational companies that are profiting from the rainforest devastation. It also says that the benefits of this biodiversity must be distributed equitably.
In that vein, the law created two institutions, the National System of Conservation Areas and the National Commission for Biodiversity Management. The latter ensures that any benefits that arise from biochemical and genetic materials of Costa Rica’s incredible flora and fauna are equitably distributed to communities. For example, there is a Chanel anti-aging cream that has a particular extract from a certain plant in Costa Rica. This institution ensures that the local small-scale farmers that grow and take care of these plants actually get a good deal out of Chanel.
YAM: While the law was passed in the 1990s, there was an enormous backlash and it took many years for the law to be implemented. Why?
NHZ: A lot of powerful elements in Costa Rican politics did not want this law to pass, and that eventually stopped the law from being implemented for a long time.
One of the biggest threats of this law, and the reason it was so controversial, was this assertion that Costa Ricans are not just the stakeholders, but the actual owners of this biodiversity. And that it belongs to them and to the generations to come. This conflicted with trade agreements. It conflicted with the way that academic research was being done. But, uniquely, this law makes the Convention on Biological Diversity legally binding in Costa Rica. This law is an example of how to make these international agreements your own by contextualizing them for your own local needs.
YAM: How were they able to get this law over the line in the end? What can Americans learn from how they did that?
NHZ: There was quite a big push from groups from a lot of different parts of Costa Rican life. That’s one of the key lessons of a lot of these policies: it’s going to require public battles and it’s going to require mass movements. What I learned from Costa Rica, but also from the UK’s National Health Service, is that even when you have these policies, you have to keep fighting to keep them, because there is no end to how many times moneyed interests will come and try to slash the things you already have. But once people feel the benefits of a program like this, it’s very hard to take it away. Because, as one of the biodiversity law architects told me, people feel it in their bones that it belongs to them and they will fight for it.
YAM: Let’s talk about Singapore, which implemented what some would consider a pretty radical housing policy. How do you think Singapore’s approach to housing impacted where it is economically today?
NHZ: One of the reasons that I wanted to include Singapore is that during their development in the 1960s, they started this radical public housing project that today houses 80 percent of Singaporeans. These are high quality, mixed-income public housing developments in which 90 percent of residents are homeowners through Singapore’s unique model.
It’s an example of how when housing is treated as a basic right it can really stabilize a country and help it grow. Many people point to its public housing policy program as one of the foundations for Singapore’s huge growth in GDP. I included it because Singapore is now hyper-capitalist and my hope is that Americans can see that I wasn’t just choosing, you know, socialist Uruguay, but actually offering examples from quite a range of different economies and different cultures and different approaches to similar problems that we have in the US.
YAM: Is there anything you wished you could have covered in the book but weren’t able to?
NHZ: I really wanted to include Uganda’s open door refugee policy for a number of different reasons. I am the daughter of displaced Iranian Jews and I truly, deeply believe that a country as wealthy as the United States should have an open door refugee policy. We should absolutely be opening our borders to people, especially since oftentimes we have had a direct hand in causing the crises that caused the displacement.
As I reported for The Nation Magazine, the 2006 Refugee Act in Uganda grants refugees equal rights to the citizens of Uganda when it comes to labor, education, and freedom of movement. All the experts I spoke to have said that the policy as it’s written is incredibly progressive, and it can and has provided a lifeline to many refugees in a region that is quite unstable. What happens is that, in practice, it’s not quite so straightforward, and that is something I saw firsthand.
Refugees can work, but it’s really difficult to have their foreign degrees and other training recognized by the Ugandan government. Education is free of charge, but due to a lack of resources, schools often will charge fees for certain things like exams, and a lot of refugees have no way to be able to pay.
So there are all these little caveats, but the biggest problem that I saw when I went to Uganda was that the law itself had actually much more to do with the West or the Global North than it had to do with Uganda and Ugandans. It seems it was not designed by Ugandans, but most likely by international non-governmental organizations that have a lot of other competing interests. Ultimately, I could not hold up an example of a policy that had not been written by and implemented and supported by people of the country itself.
YAM: You visited lots of places and talked to lots of people. Was there anything that particularly struck you that all of these very different people and places had in common?
NHZ: There was a real feeling of political will, but there was also a sense of collective ownership over these policies, of people feeling the collective benefits of these policies. This comes back to the fact that they were designed with the majority in mind, and with the public good in mind. This is, again, something that I find really lacking in the US. Often, when we disentangle how policy works or who it’s written by, you start to see all of these moneyed interests that were behind it. That is something that I think we’re really going to need to continue to fight against in the US and elsewhere if we’re ever going to get policies that work for the majority.
YAM: Is there a difference in the way that you think Global South countries approach these types of problems and challenges versus the way they do it in the United States?
NHZ: A lot of times for countries with less resources, it becomes an existential question. It really encourages people to look for scrappier solutions.
But I also think that a huge part of the problem that we’re dealing with in the US still today is the legacy of the Cold War and how much stigma there is attached to words like socialism or communism. People in Uruguay were not afraid of a socialist government. They have just re-elected the Frente Amplio, which includes a whole range of leftists, including socialists.
That stigma in the US is slowly dissipating, and people are able to see that things are very broken in the US. Hopefully it’s now getting to the point that it’s undeniable. The same way it was undeniable that something had to be done in Uruguay, with its grid, and in Costa Rica with protecting biodiversity and reversing deforestation. I think that it’s becoming undeniable to Americans, too, that we have to start thinking differently about our policies and how and for whom they are designed.