1st Edition
Confronting Climate Coloniality Decolonizing Pathways for Climate Justice
This timely and urgent collection brings together cutting-edge interdisciplinary scholarship and ideas from around the world to present critical examinations of climate coloniality.
Confronting Climate Coloniality exposes how legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism co-produce and exacerbate the climate crisis, create disproportionate impacts on those who contributed the least to climate change, and influence global and local responses. Climate coloniality is perpetuated through processes of neoliberalism, racial capitalism, development interventions, economic growth models, media, and education. Confronting climate coloniality entails decolonizing climate discourses and governance, challenging the dominant framings and policies, interrogating material, geopolitical, and institutional arrangements for tackling the climate crisis, and centering Global South and Indigenous knowledge, experiences, strategies, and solutions. Confronting Climate Coloniality: Decolonizing Pathways for Climate Justice provides critical insights and strategies for transformative action and fosters deeper understandings of the structural injustices entangled with climate change in governance, framings, policies, responses, and praxis. This collection offers pioneering interdisciplinary research on alternative frameworks for decolonized approaches for more meaningful climate justice.
With originality, scholarly rigor, and emphasis on amplifying marginalized voices, this collection is an indispensable resource for interdisciplinary scholars, policymakers, and activists committed to advancing climate justice.
List of Contributors
List of Figures
Preface
1. Urgency, Complexities, and Strategies to Confront Climate Coloniality and Decolonize Pathways for Climate Justice
Farhana Sultana
PART I: CONFRONTING AND DECOLONIZING CLIMATE GOVERNANCE
2. The Coloniality of Climate Apartheid: Excising Colonial Legacies in Climate Development and Governance
Joshua Long
3. The De/Coloniality of Global Climate Governance and Indigenous Politics within the UNFCCC
Jamie Haverkamp
4. State Power and Capital in the Climate Crisis: A Theory of Fossil Imperialism
Elias König and Bernardo Jurema
PART II: CONFRONTING AND DECOLONIZING CLIMATE FRAMINGS AND POLICIES
5. The Politics of “Heaviness” in Climate Emergency
Diren Valayden
6. Buying the Dead, Burying the Poor: Climate Change and Pastoral Drought Coping Strategies in East Africa
Bilal Butt
7. Towards an African Epistemic Site for Biodiversity Conservation and Climate Action
Aby L. Sène
8. AlterNatives to Blue Carbon Coloniality: An ʻŌiwi Perspective on Redirecting Funding to Indigenous Stewardship
Andrew Kalani Carlson
PART III: CONFRONTING AND DECOLONIZING CLIMATE RESPONSES AND PRAXIS
9. Performative Environmentalism and the Everyday Legitimation of Climate Coloniality
Manisha Anantharaman
10. Fuera SpaceX: Resisting Climate Coloniality Via Terra Nullius Within Contested Boca Chica State Park
Danielle Zoe Rivera and Eliza Breder
11. Antiblackness in Flood Risk in Hull: The Afterlife of Colonialism
Michael Lomotey
12. Crises, Coloniality, and Energy Transformations in Puerto Rico
Laura Kuhl, Marla Perez-Lugo, Carlos Arriaga Serrano, Cecilio Ortiz-Garcia, Ryan Ellis, and Jennie C. Stephens
13. Afterword
Mimi Sheller
Index
Biography
Farhana Sultana, Ph.D., is Professor of Geography and the Environment at Syracuse University, USA and Visiting Faculty Fellow at the International Centre for Climate Change and Development, Independent University, Bangladesh. She is an interdisciplinary feminist political ecologist researching the entanglements of climate justice, water governance, international development, and anti-colonial politics.
“Confronting Climate Coloniality: Decolonizing Pathways for Climate Justice edited by Farhana Sultana is essential reading for finding just decolonising pathways for addressing Climate Colonialism. The contributions take us to the roots of climate change beginning with colonialism , addressing the continued colonisations in new forms of racism, capitalist patriarchy, and new forms of climate imperialism and enclosures of the commons. They also show the path of solidarity, community and care which are paths of decolonising power & knowledge.”
Vandana Shiva, Founder, Navdanya, India, and recipient of the Right Livelihood Award
“Confronting Climate Coloniality is an invaluable tool for educators, students and organizers seeking a deeper understanding of the myriad ways that ecological crises intersect with imperialism and racial capitalism. A vital contribution to the literature of climate justice.”
Naomi Klein, co-director of University of British Columbia’s Centre For Climate Justice
"Confronting Climate Coloniality: Decolonizing Pathways for Climate Justice is an indispensable addition to the fast-growing literature on the many and varied connections between colonialism and the current planetary crisis."
Amitav Ghosh, author of Nutmeg’s Curse and The Great Derangement
"Here is a book of the moment, boldly confronting coloniality of climate as an existential problem and deploying decoloniality as a necessity for its mitigation."
Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Chair in Epistemologies of the Global South, University of Bayreuth, Germany
“There is enormous injustice in climate change. Those who have contributed the least will suffer the most. Confronting Climate Coloniality: Decolonizing Pathways for Climate Justice collects many courageous examples of powerful resistance to such injustice coming from the majorities of the world, BIPOC populations fighting the coloniality of power and the coloniality of knowledge. It is an optimistic book in these times of despondency.”
Joan Martínez-Alier, Emeritus Professor, ICTA-Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain, and recipient of the Balzan prize 2020 and Holberg prize 2023
“This powerful collection of essays challenges mainstream narratives on climate change and makes an urgent case for radical climate justice. Drawing together material from various global locations, Confronting Climate Coloniality: Decolonizing Pathways for Climate Justice will be necessary reading for all those interested in equitable solutions to the looming climate catastrophe that acknowledge the historic role of colonialism in the present unequal distribution of its costs.”
Gurminder K Bhambra, co-author of Colonialism and Modern Social Theory
