Convened by Lisa-Marlen Gronemeier, Sumbal Bashir, Beatrice Hati Gitundu, Delu Lusambya Mwenebyake, Jonathan Moniz, Watfa Najdi, Tamara Soukotta and Cynthia Embido Bejeno, International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam

While presented as a universal paradigm, Sustainable Development has been criticized as an imposition of a western global design that is inherently colonial, anthropocentric, and capitalocentric (Harris 2012, Moniz 2024). It is offered as a solution to climate change and ecological crises whose diagnoses erase histories of colonialism and enslavement and ongoing violent practices of extraction, exploitation, and accumulation. Understood as hierarchically separate from the environment, the (western) ‘human’ is positioned as the historical agent driving progress and now pioneering Sustainability (Moniz 2024). Dressed in a new language, Sustainable Development remains embedded within western knowledge systems, capitalist social relations, and colonial power, while being presented as the universal future that promises salvation.

The meta-narrative of Sustainability perpetuates and conceals its violent underside - the dispossession, enclosure, and criminalization of social and ecological worlds, and ways of knowing, living, and relating otherwise (Moniz 2024). This leads us to ask: How is Sustainability conceived and what is erased? What is at the underside of Sustainability? What pluriversal alternatives are being imagined and practiced?

Recent scholarly works have noted the need to build connections between sustainability and epistemic justice (such as Cummings, S. et al (2023). Cummings, S. et al (2025), Marovah, T (2023), Waldmüller, Yap, and Watene (2022)). Building on this emerging scholarship, the panel seeks to explore decolonial methodologies and pedagogies as tools to interrogate these dynamics and cultivate life-affirming alternatives. 

The panel invites contributions that explore approaches to research, learning, teaching, policymaking, and practice that unsettle the meta-narrative of Sustainability, uncover its coloniality, and connect with local and transnational visions and practices beyond it.