Periodic Reporting for period 1 - POSTGROWTH (A feminist and decolonial approach to studying environmental movements in the Democratic Republic of the Congo)
Berichtszeitraum: 2022-08-01 bis 2024-10-31
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.
The project has reviewed the ways in which anthropological scholarship has been drawn upon by political ecologists interested in forms of economic, social, and political organization which could stand as alternatives to the dominant ecomodernist paradigm of ‘green growth,’ and developed a novel paradigm which would engage anthropologists more directly in such debates. Aspects of the project have been presented as part of the following forums:
(1) Organisation of a reading seminar for research communities: ‘Readings on the Decolonial Turn’ September to December 2022: https://soc.kuleuven.be/anthropology/technology-and-society/decolonizing-social-sciences-a-reading-group(öffnet in neuem Fenster)
(2) Roundtable ‘Anthropological Perspectives on Growth and Degrowth’ organised by the Antropologen Beroepsvereniging (ABv, Dutch association of anthropologists) in March 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdZKDiPZ2Ok(öffnet in neuem Fenster)
(3) Organisation of a reading seminar for research communities: ‘Feminist and Decolonial Approaches’ March to June 2023: https://soc.kuleuven.be/anthropology/technology-and-society/feminist-reading-group(öffnet in neuem Fenster)
(4) Organisation of and participation in a double panel ‘Rethinking Degrowth from Africa’ at the European Conference on African Studies in May 2023
(5) Participation in a two-day ‘Anthropology and Degrowth: deepening the dialogue’ workshop in June 2023
Several publications addressing growth, degrowth, and environmental activism in DRC, all resulting from the research and data collection, are currently in preparation.
(1) Organisation of a reading seminar for research communities: ‘Readings on the Decolonial Turn’ September to December 2022: https://soc.kuleuven.be/anthropology/technology-and-society/decolonizing-social-sciences-a-reading-group(öffnet in neuem Fenster)
(2) Roundtable ‘Anthropological Perspectives on Growth and Degrowth’ organised by the Antropologen Beroepsvereniging (ABv, Dutch association of anthropologists) in March 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdZKDiPZ2Ok(öffnet in neuem Fenster)
(3) Organisation of a reading seminar for research communities: ‘Feminist and Decolonial Approaches’ March to June 2023: https://soc.kuleuven.be/anthropology/technology-and-society/feminist-reading-group(öffnet in neuem Fenster)
(4) Organisation of and participation in a double panel ‘Rethinking Degrowth from Africa’ at the European Conference on African Studies in May 2023
(5) Participation in a two-day ‘Anthropology and Degrowth: deepening the dialogue’ workshop in June 2023
Several publications addressing growth, degrowth, and environmental activism in DRC, all resulting from the research and data collection, are currently in preparation.
This project asks questions relating to one of the most important contemporary challenges: mitigating and adapting to environmental degradation in a way which is democratic, effective, and does not deepen global inequities. Its focus is particularly topical because: (1) degrowth and postgrowth discourse occupies an expanding niche at the intersection of social and applied environmental sciences, and is increasingly relevant to broader society – as evidenced by recent political initiatives like the European Green Deal, which draws on certain elements of degrowth theory; (2) there is growing emphasis in both scholarship and policy to ‘decolonise’ – that is, to build solidarity and collaborations with the Global South, and to prioritise the voices of people from the South; (3) a focus on new community forestry laws is highly topical, given recent reports (including my own research) demonstrating that both the industrial logging model and the conservation model deliver poor outcomes in terms of poverty reduction and biodiversity loss in the Congo Basin; (4) the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is an excellent case study for contemporary environmental issues: it has the world’s largest reserves of the minerals at the centre of ‘green extractivism’ (the extraction of resources needed to decarbonize the economy, e.g. lithium for electric cars). It is also one of the most biodiverse countries on earth and receives millions of dollars from US, European and other major bilateral donors for environmental projects; (5) the DRC’s forests are home to approximately 35 million Congolese, who have been heavily impacted – but largely overlooked – by both extractivist and environmentalist interventions, despite recent global consortium reports2 which conclude that Indigenous peoples and local communities are the best stewards of the environment.