EcoSImies of care: a proposal for decolonizing ‘sustainable development’

Abstract

This article focuses on questions of power, colonialism and capitalist relations in order to understand and disrupt the dominant discourse and project of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. I analyse the mainstream sustainable development conceptual framework (WB 2012; UN 2015; UNDP 2016) and argue that it has become profoundly problematic, even seriously unthinkable, to do good work under the current ‘development’ framework, with its modernist and extractivist premises of bounded individualism and human exceptionalism. There is urgent need for new discourses and modes of representation that shift resource-related debates to open platforms for engaged, decolonized, and decentralized public discourse. Drawing on feminist, indigenous, decolonial art and critical environmentalist knowledges, I propose here an ‘ecoSImies of care’ as a way to think beyond the dead end of sustainable development green capitalism and resurrect a ‘limit to growth’ and sustainability of life discourse and practices. In this sense, ecoSImies of care open a radical way of imagining the economy and economics as multiple, inter-eco-dependent, polyvocal, and as bringing together social-political insights in a contextual and situated manner.