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.
