Convened by Richard Hemraj Toppo and Pierre Merlet, Institute of Development Policy, University of Antwerp, and Manish Surin, University of Sussex

The frequent appeal to blend global environmental challenges with local solutions is often framed as transformative, participatory and, at times, even decolonial, claiming that it has the potential to disrupt existing power relations while keeping afloat the goals of environmental ‘sustainability’. In the face of such projections of g(local) solutions, this panel attempts to make a comprehensive critique of its epistemological and material orientations. Our panel hypothesizes that g(local) environmental solutions are part of the coloniality matrix. This coloniality emerges in the interactions between global and local where: global ecological challenges are above all framed in service of western-oriented capitalist structures; and second, the local solutions are motivated to be compatible with financial sensibilities of such structures. Our panel problematizes the entire framing of ‘problem-solution’, where the problem framing itself solicits the consumption of a colonial-capitalist perpetuating solution. This is frequently reflected in the innovation field, where ‘green metals’ for instance are seen as climate solutions, without questioning the consumption logic of such innovations or their absolute reliance on exploitative markets. But this is not to dismiss or deny the agency of the grassroots that have come to intimately and courageously navigate through these structures; instead, we wish to understand the broader dialectics, also examining the ways in which these processes can be challenged. In doing so, we look up to the local, contextualized or indigenous ways of being and living that are epistemically delinked from the problem-solution orientation – it’s the capitalist logic that seeks and commodifies solutions from indigenous or local lives. We invite contributions that critically examine the g(local) environmental problems and solutions, and that broadens our counter epistemic bases towards re-imagining decolonial anti-capitalist futures.