POSTGROWTH · A feminist and decolonial approach to studying environmental movements in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

A feminist and decolonial approach to studying environmental movements in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

In the face of an escalating climate crisis, social scientists are confronted with an urgent challenge: How can our research contribute to facilitating the kind of radical economic and political reorganizations necessary for reduced resource use on a global scale? European scholars, activists and policymakers are at the vanguard of this research, and many approaches have coalesced around theories of ‘degrowth’ and ‘postgrowth’, which study and envisage the transformations necessary to create a socially just and ecologically sustainable society. However, this is not solely a European challenge – it is a global challenge. Indeed, people of the Global South have been and continue to be the most impacted by the environmental devastation being wrought by the climate crisis. One of the most pressing challenges is therefore to co-construct these theories and movements with activists and thinkers from the Global South. To address this challenge, this project proposes to work on environmental justice movements in both urban and rural Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) using novel participatory methods that engage African activists and scholars. The overall aim of the project is to develop a novel paradigm and research agenda in anthropology (‘postgrowth anthropology’) which studies alternatives to growth and prioritises decolonial methods in studies of environmental justice movements. To contribute to this novel paradigm, ethnographic research will be conducted on environmental movements which have challenged ‘growthism’ and ‘green development’ in urban and rural DRC in order to examine the ways in which these movements and innovations embody the degrowth values of sustainability, solidarity, conviviality and direct democracy.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union