EcoSImies of care: a proposal for decolonizing ‘sustainable development’ (original) (raw)

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. By doing so, I analyse its 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. Concurrently, I argue there is an urgent need for new discourses and modes of representation that shift resource-related debates to open platforms for engaged, decolonising, and decentralised public discourse. Drawing on feminist, Indigenous, and decolonial art and critical environmentalist knowledges, I propose ‘ecoSImies of care’ as a way to think beyond the dead end of sustainable development green capitalism and to resurrect a limit to growth and sustainability of life discourses and practices. In this sense, ecoSImies of care open a radical way of imagining the economy and Economics as multiple, inter-eco-dependent, and polyvocal, and as bringing together social-political insights in a contextual and situated manner for sustainable futures.