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Humans’ aspirations for development have unsustainably placed momentous pressure on the Earth. Peripheral Africa remains the most susceptible region to climate change and its impacts. By considering externality and world-systems theories, this article uses the Delphi external experts (DEE) approach to weigh the perceptions of global (and mostly core) experts regarding climate change response/sustainability. The socio-econo-technological development factors that contribute to Africa’s climate change issues are evaluated. The article concludes that despite the high rankings of the factors related to emissions’ propensity, such as energy and transportation, governance and socio-cultural preferences are the two factors that are statistically significant to climate change and vulnerability to it. The global governance structure fostered by the core countries facilitates unequal exchanges. Notwithstanding, responsive governance structures are advised for the periphery. Governance is analogous to a thermostat that can be used to regulate other development factors, in particular to entrench socio-cultural preferences that may have a desirable future impact on the climate.

Contemporary social science needs to formulate a world sociology, and with regard to this problematic, world system theory occupies an important place. At an earlier stage world system theory has been criticised for overemphasising the world market while neglecting forces and relations of production. The present critique focuses on conceptual dimensions of world system theory and on the relationship between its conceptual structure and the way it theorises social change and action. World system theory is a theory of the world system without a system theory. Its actual conceptual units are `social systems', one of which is the `modern world system'. The assumptions which define these need to be examined as well as how they are thought to relate to one another and how one changes into another. This is one of the fundamental conceptual problems of world system theory. It shares this difficulty in conceptualising structure change with other `structural' approaches, such as structural history of the Annales school. In world system theory this is combined with neo-Marxist dependency theory and an, in other respects, conventional Marxism, replicating several of the deficiencies of these approaches-the centrism of dependency thinking and the materialism and determinism of conventional Marxism. To address the question of structure change, in particular how the `modern world system' can be transformed to a successor social system, world system theory revives the Marxist theory of the crisis of capitalism, i.e. one of the weakest theorems of Marxist thought.