By Lyla Mehta
The colonial roots of sustainability
Since the Brundtland Commission advanced the concept of sustainable development in 1987, a lively strand in Development Studies (DS) has engaged with the linkages between environment, sustainability and development. This remained fairly niche until the 2030 Agenda and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) goals mainstreamed sustainable development.
While engagement with sustainability and the environment may seem like a neutral way to describe relationships between humans and nature, the roots of sustainable development are in reality deeply shaped by the legacies of colonisation and coloniality. These have shaped patterns of thinking, institutional structures, and flows of money and resources from the times of Europe’s colonies and empires. Numerous colonial mechanisms and biases resulted in certain forms of value and valuing, problematic views of ‘pristine nature’ as well as processes of expansion that led to dispossession and violence, especially for Indigenous and marginalised communities and peoples of colour.
For example, European colonial policies and interventions in forestry, agriculture and mining in the so-called ‘tropics’ were geared to extractivism and profits . Their social consequences were often devastating, accompanied by slavery, racialised discrimination , violence and the grabbing of land and livelihoods from local women and men. In parallel, there was the aesthetic and moral urge to preserve an imagined pristine nature and wilderness which has continued in modern-day ‘fortress conservation’, where large tracts of land are fenced off against perceived threats from local people. To this day, environmental, conservation and sustainability policies tend to label local people and their practices as primitive or environmental destroyers, justifying their removal or re-education. Borders and leaders have changed, but forms of so-called ‘sustainable development’ that dispossess people of rights and livelihoods still abound with different present-day justifications. Modern projects are carried out in the name of green energy as well as climate adaptation and mitigation – including solar parks and wind farms – with some of them perpetuating social and environmental control, securitization as well as social and gendered injustices.
Addressing colonial biases in Development Studies
Many DS institutions across Europe were established as colonial and post-colonial institutions to support their governments’ aid programmes. Today DS has moved from being a field largely focused on the economic development of former colonies to a vibrant field that embraces multidisciplinary and normative perspectives concerning social, gender and environmental justice. Critical conceptual and empirical work on nature-society relations has played a key but overlooked role in this shift. Researchers working on the environment, gender and sustainability have brought together DS with science technology studies (STS), (feminist) political ecology, anthropology and feminist epistemology. This has resulted in strong engagements with the politics of knowledge, the colonial roots of environmental problems and the need to explore alternative ways of understanding development and nature/ society relations. economic and colonial legacies.
Decolonising the discipline
Supported by inductive and long-term research together with local people, the legacies of colonial mechanisms and biases can be decolonized in multiple ways. First, this means engaging in scientific enquiries that bring to the fore hidden invisible and marginalized perspectives and alternative visions that are missing in the dominant scientific framings shaped by Western world views. This means striving for cognitive and epistemic justice, and allowing for the perspectives and experiences of mostly marginalized peoples to be the starting point of scientific analyses.
Second, it means countering colonial legacies that, to this day, perpetuate the notion that certain lives and livelihoods are ‘unproductive’ and ‘destructive.’ Take drylands or so called ‘wastelands’ in South Asia. Colonial rulers treated such lands as inferior and sought to make them ‘productive’ via monoculture plantations and irrigated agriculture. Post-colonial India continues to view them as barren spaces that need to be diverted for ‘development’ and commercial purposes. Local users of these resources, such as pastoralists, are vilified and have been discouraged or prevented from freely moving with their herds. Yet as revealed through co produced research in the Tapestry project for example, pastoralist practices can often restore drylands and biodiversity while contributing to climate adaptation.
Third, given that climate and environmental extremes are affecting all aspects of development, the impacts of environmental and climate change are now being addressed by DS scholars who would not normally work on environmental issues. However, this often takes place in reductionist ways without looking at the complexities around attribution, causality, tenure, access, existing vulnerabilities and how climate change cannot be isolated from wider socio-political and colonial legacies. This requires also pushing back against mainstream adaptation and mitigation responses that promote greenwashing and deny the colonial roots of the climate crisis.
The challenges that remain
Decolonisation is currently a buzzword often used glibly, rather than helping in a radical orientation of our ways of thinking, seeing and working. It has been co-opted by some far-right actors, for example, Hindu nationalists who elevate certain Hindu ways of thinking but in doing so are erasing Islamic history from textbooks and resorting to culture wars that target minorities. Moreover, there still remain many inconsistencies in terms of funding and governance structures as well as silence on issues of the white gaze, race and racism, calling for the need to decolonise our practices, institutional arrangements and projects. This entails addressing multiple dimensions of power and privilege around race, gender, sexuality, nationality, neurodivergence and passport use. It is equally important for non-white experts like myself to question the dimensions of privilege we may have grown up with and take for granted.
Despite striving for equitable partnerships between majority and minority world researchers, in practice, power and knowledge asymmetries, massive differences in institutional capacities and dangers of co-option remain. For example, studies on climate change in Africa, a continent hugely vulnerable to climate extremes, are being conducted without the inputs of African scholars which will impact applicability on the ground. Finally, DS cannot claim to be working on the linkages between global inequality, poverty and environmental destruction and yet keep silent in the face of human-induced famine and genocide in places like Gaza, Tigray, Sudan etc. After all, European countries are complicit in aidwashing and, simultaneously supporting the military-industrial complex that perpetuate these wars. We thus need to call out and make every possible effort to resist the structures that perpetuate these grave injustices, as well, as the mass destruction of life itself.
This article is based on the paper “The Challenges of Decolonising Sustainability and the Environment in Development Studies (DS)” in the European Journal of Development Research (EJDR)
Note: This article gives the views of the author, not the position of the EADI Debating Development Blog or the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes
Lyla Mehta is Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex and a Visiting Professor at Noragric, the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. She trained as a sociologist (University of Vienna) and has a PhD in Development Studies (University of Sussex). Her work focuses on water and sanitation, climate change, transformation, rights, resource grabbing and the politics of sustainability, scarcity and uncertainty.
Image: Edward Kimmel under a creative commons licence on Wikimedia