Addressing the global challenges highlighted by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals will require a transformation of systems that created the problems in the first place. Knowledge workers are part of that system - our funding and publishing practices are dominated by western colonial paradigms, biases, mindsets, and money. This panel will explore how to decolonize sustainability research, policy, systems thinking, and awareness. How do we redefine the opportunities to challenge the incumbent ways of doing, knowing, and learning in order to engage non-western sustainability knowledge workers? What needs to change and how to extend their agency and creativity? And how will this enable us to be more effective in pursuing sustainability, as well as pursue radically different approaches to sustainability?

In the Global South, ‘coloniality’ has long been associated with political rule over subordinated countries. Struggles for ‘decoloniality’ have evolved from the undoing of colonial rule to the more fundamental challenge of freeing knowledge, practice, and culture from deeper concentrations of incumbent power. In keeping with the more expansive ambitions of the Sustainable Development Goals, a decolonization framework encompasses some of the most profound and pervasive critiques of globalizing structures and their conditioning effects in every setting. The neglected imperative to ‘decolonize methodologies’ in research and policy appraisal embodies some of the key challenges in this sustainability – offering crucial opportunities for thinking, knowing, and doing. By looking to indigenous worldviews and the Global South, it is possible and necessary to nurture a complexity mindset and innovate for sustainability radically differently.

Our panelists shared their own experiences of decolonizing knowledge practices in different contexts (e.g. Peru, Canada First Nations, Africa) and from distinct perspectives. Together, they reflected on the challenges around decolonization as a transformational approach, and examined how to adapt and contextualize wise practices from around the world to different cultural settings, as well as how to scale up to achieve fundamental change. Speakers:

• Melanie Goodchild (Systems scholar, Ojibway moose clan First Nations, Canada).

• Andrea Jimenez Cisneros (Lecturer, University of Sheffield, from Peru). 

• Joel Onyango (African Researchers Consortium, Kenya).