By Stella Rehbein
September 29, 2025
At Climate Week NYC 2025, Kite Insights brought its DEBATABLE format to the Climate Hub, in partnership with the Climate Group, for a live debate on a provocative motion: 'The 21st century leader is disobedient'.
The session was moderated by Sophie Lambin, founder and CEO of Kite Insights, and Fiona McRaith, director of the Climate Pledge at Global Optimism.
Setting up the motion
Sophie described the motion as "debatable", both simple and unsettling, particularly in a time of multiple crises and "timid" leadership. She put a set of questions to the room: can only those willing to defy the rules deliver what is necessary today, or will that breed chaos? Do different moments call for different kinds of leadership? Do we even have the choice? Is it too late to cultivate leadership in the right way?
Fiona admitted she had not yet made up her mind on the motion. Reflecting on a recent UN General Assembly address, she observed that the UN's halls "were established and uphold a system that came after a great time of change in the world, and a time of discernment and pain and wars and loss... and through that, systems were developed." Her questions for the debate ahead: what are those systems, what does being disobedient to them actually mean, and who counts as a leader today, individuals, civil society, or both? "We all know leaders can say one thing," she said, "and most people and leaders on the ground are doing something totally different." She closed with a note of cautious optimism: "There is so much progress we have already made as humankind, and we are in a moment where the scales are imbalanced, and how we proceed and collectively have these conversations will make the difference."
Is disobedience the remedy to the logic of industrialisation and consumerism?
Genevieve Guenther, founding director of End Climate Silence, opened by arguing that apparent disobedience can mask a deeper obedience. "However lawless, unscientific, disruptive and disobedient Donald Trump may seem," she argued, "he and his authoritarian allies are united in one objective: obedience to one law, that of sustaining the assets of fossil capital in the face of climate breakdown." She pointed to the trillion dollars in fixed and liquid capital tied to fossil fuel infrastructure, storage, refineries and transport, and argued that phasing out fossil fuels would strand these assets and the loans built on them. Her conclusion: "Global decarbonisation requires a massive, fundamental reorganisation of our economy, and that is why true leadership in the 21st century, leadership that devotes itself to the majority not to the few, will devote itself to this reorganisation. Allowing the world to be destroyed is not leadership. It is plunder... That is why 21st century leadership must be disobedient to the hegemony of fossil capital."
Marcelo Behar, special envoy for bioeconomy at COP30 Brazil and senior advisor to WBCSD and CEBDS, drew on the work of French anthropologist Pierre Clastres and his studies of societies that organised themselves against state structures, particularly the Guaraní people. Among the Guaraní, he explained, a leader "can never state that he is the leader. He must support everyone." Disobedience, in this framing, means leadership that sits beneath society rather than on top of it. Behar connected this to the Guaraní word "mutirão", adopted by the COP30 presidency to describe the collective action needed to bring down emissions: "We know what we need to be doing, connecting finance to the right things." His central point: "Disobedience is not about doing things right. It is about knowing exactly what you should be doing, and how you can also help the process."
Kirsten Dunlop, CEO of Climate-KIC, defined disobedience plainly as "the refusal to obey the rules, or obey someone in authority." She traced obedience back to feudalism, reinforced through industrialisation and again through consumerism. Civil disobedience, she argued, "calls for a social progress that considers the possibility that the authority, and the rules, may not be the ones we need." Pointing to the risks of biodiversity collapse, pollution and what she called AI "deep-coding us into compliance", she argued that collective disobedience is "a tactic for the weak, and in what we face, we are all weak." Her conclusion: "Collaboration is disobedience", a way of taking distance from destructive patterns.
But do we need disobedience - or imagination?
Ayisha Siddiqa, founder and executive director of the Future Generations Tribunal, spoke from her position as an Indigenous woman and a member of the generation inheriting the climate crisis. "My people, in every corner of the world, are failed by leaders," she said. She cited figures on fossil fuel subsidies and emissions, the gap between promised and delivered climate finance, and the rise of authoritarianism in multiple countries, arguing that "when the youth, the people and the masses are rising, they are met with batons, police officers and jail cells." She extended her argument to Gaza, noting the scale of bombing and its climate impact, and closed with a direct challenge: "If leaders, those we have elected into power at the UN General Assembly, cannot stop a genocide we are watching on TV, how are they going to stop the climate crisis?"
Faustine Delasalle, CEO of Mission Possible Partnership, agreed that systemic change is needed but argued that disobedience can backfire in a polarised world, citing examples of climate protest tipping into conflict and undermining public support. "I don't think the 21st century leader should be disobedient," she said. "I think they should be courageous, clever and collaborative. Courageous to set a high ambition and stay true to it, clever to astutely work the system to achieve its goals, and collaborative because we need to work across policy, business, finance and civil society." She pointed to leaders such as Christiana Figueres, architect of the Paris Agreement, as examples of people who "don't break the rules, but bend the rules enough to make an impact right now."
Phoebe Tickell, founder and director of Moral Imaginations, offered the debate's sharpest reframing: "Every revolutionary thinks they are the first person to say no, but here is what they don't tell you about disobedience: it is the most obedient thing you can do." She argued that defining yourself by opposition still plays by the same rules, just in reverse, and that disobedience as an organising principle tends to fragment movements from within, citing the internal splits within Extinction Rebellion as an example. What the 21st century calls for instead, she argued, is "imagination activism": leadership that "doesn't just resist current reality, but actually creates new, life-affirming possibilities." Her closing line: "True 21st century leadership means changing the game entirely, not through resistance but through the revolutionary act of creating something new."
Disobedience to what, exactly? Questions from the jury
Three jury members pushed the debaters towards greater precision. Rebecca Henderson, John and Natty McArthur University Professor at Harvard, asked simply: "Disobedient to what?" She suggested that one of the things leaders most need to be disobedient to is "the voices of fear inside ourselves", and challenged both teams to be precise about what they want people to do differently, and why. Reflecting on the strategic failures of the climate movement over the past two decades, she argued for the courage to say plainly that "the whole civilisation is coming apart", and that what is needed is the courage to act from love.
Heeta Lakhani, founder and managing director of the ClimAct Initiative, agreed that the debate needed sharper definition: "We talk about reimagining systems and rethinking the world, but what we really need to do is re-examine the way we are acting currently." Drawing on her work with young people, she pointed to radicalisation, brilliance of ideas and change building from the ground up, and argued that without clarity on where we want to go, "no idea of obedience or disobedience is going to get us there."
Sandrine Dixson-Declève, honorary president of the Club of Rome and executive chair of Earth4All, asked the room to think about what disobedience looks like in practice, beyond the stage. Reflecting on a UN ministerial meeting she had just left, where a minister spoke of "the poison of me first", she asked whether that was disobedience, or its opposite. She called for a shift "from the me to the we, from the individual to the collective, and from the ego to the eco."
Final arguments
Closing for the 'Against' team, Phoebe Tickell clarified the team's position: "We are not saying that disobedience is never needed, but what we are saying is that in these times, what we really need, in the 21st century, is courage." She pointed to the Montreal Protocol and the end of apartheid in South Africa as examples of courage built through collaboration rather than confrontation, asking the room to consider where the world would be had Nelson Mandela closed himself off to other perspectives.
Closing for the 'For' team, Kirsten Dunlop argued that both sides risked converging on the same point, but pressed the distinction further: "Disobedience is a move, it isn't necessarily an individual act, nor a selfish act, nor the act of a hero. There are collective acts of disobedience." With the old world falling apart and the new one not yet built, she argued, the task is to name what is broken and "give ourselves permission to engage."
The applause meter ended in a tie.
Why this debate matters
The result, a genuine deadlock, reflects how finely balanced this question is for leaders navigating the climate crisis today. Both teams ultimately converged on similar territory: a rejection of individual heroics in favour of collective, considered action, whether that action is labelled disobedience or courage. The disagreement was less about whether change is needed, and more about which posture, defiance or collaboration, is more likely to deliver it under current conditions.
This is precisely the kind of question DEBATABLE is designed to surface: not a binary to be resolved, but a tension worth sitting with, particularly for leaders and organisations trying to work out where they stand.
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