Decolonising innovation in sustainability transitions for pluriversal justice and wellbeing

Abstract

Sustainability scholars address social-ecological injustices associated with innovation processes, through concepts such as ‘just transitions’ and ‘energy justice’. However, the making of today’s innovations by deep and pervasive formations of power and privilege – colonial modernities – is currently neglected in sustainability transition studies. We conceptualise nine epistemological and ontological foundations of distinctively colonial-modern innovation processes. These foundations include: fixing categorical divides on flowing relations; stratifying rigidly separated orders; promoting appropriation of privileges; objectifying and reifying realities; monopolising quantifications; standardising practices; singularising ontology, by approaching the pluriverse (of many different and connected ways of knowing, being and doing in disparate worlds) as just one world; and dominating other worlds by colonial-modern worldmaking.

Taken together, these interwoven foundations point to the following actions to help decolonise modern innovation processes: recognising and challenging colonial formations of concentrated power and privilege as they are built into modern knowing; extending egalitarian relations towards intersectionally marginalised contributors in knowledge production; grasping multifarious encompassment by wider material and living ecologies of beings notionally separated as ‘human’ or ‘nonhuman’; embracing inherent uncertainties in all that can be known or made, to imbue knowing and making with humility and care; admitting open pluralities of qualities, which include approaching dimensions of categories as fluid; and supporting pluriversal reparations spanning many ways of knowing, in struggles to dismantle coloniality everywhere. Decolonising innovation processes in these ways, we propose, can contribute to deeper decolonial transformations of modernities in solidarity with colonially subordinated peoples’ struggles for pluriversal wellbeing and justice. Without realising such justice for the flourishing of many worlds, sustainability may remain little more than a modern illusion.