Book Talk - ‘Confronting Climate Coloniality: Decolonizing Pathways for Climate Justice’

 In this talk, Sultana—the volume’s editor and a contributing author—discusses the book and how it engages grounded realities and theories to offer pioneering interdisciplinary research on alternative frameworks for decolonized approaches that allow pursuing more meaningful climate justice and uplifting of marginalized voices.

Climate change and related disasters are wreaking havoc across the globe, but unevenly and inequitably. Climate coloniality is a critical framework for understanding the contemporary climate crisis by exposing how legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism co-produce and exacerbate the climate crisis, create disproportionate and uneven impacts on those who contributed the least to climate change, and influence global and local responses. Climate coloniality is perpetuated through processes of neoliberalism, racial capitalism, development interventions, economic growth models, media, and education. Confronting climate coloniality entails decolonizing climate discourses and governance, challenging the dominant framings and policies, interrogating material, geopolitical, and institutional arrangements for tackling the climate crisis, and centering Global South and indigenous knowledge, experiences, strategies, and solutions.

“Confronting Climate Coloniality: Decolonizing Pathways for Climate Justice” (Routledge, October 2024) is a collection of essays that provides critical insights and strategies for transformative action and fosters deeper understandings of the structural injustices entangled with climate change and ecological degradation in governance, framings, policies, responses, and praxis.

Farhana Sultana is professor of geography and the environment, senior research associate of the South Asia Center, and research director or environmental conflict and collaborationin in the Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflict and Collaboration (PARCC).

She is an internationally recognized interdisciplinary scholar of political ecology, post‐colonial development, water and climate justice, decolonizing knowledge systems, and South Asia. Her scholarship integrates insights from interdisciplinary academic training, international policy work and lived experience across continents.

Author of several dozen publications, her latest book is “Confronting Climate Coloniality: Decolonizing Pathways for Climate Justice” (Routledge, 2024).