Enactments of Climate Coloniality & Towards Adaptation Otherwise

Abstract

The ‘coloniality of power’ (Quijano, 2000) courses throughout climate action, from the global negotiations of the UNFCCC to grounded sites of intervention within the lived realities of frontline communities. In this paper, I draw upon my ongoing climate research across political scales, from ethnographic participatory research with Andean communities (Haverkamp, 2021) to observations within the UNFCCC process (Haverkamp, 2022), in order to animate the pervasiveness of the colonial relations and rationalities that inform and shape mainstream climate actions. Across these disparate sites and scales, I find that the coloniality of power consistently manifests in the erasure of indigenous and local peoples from ancestral ways of life, land and collective relations, and from worldmaking projects via ethnocentric practices of climate resilient development that privilege white, western, and masculinist ways of knowing and being. In solidarity with those noticing the “unbearable heaviness of climate coloniality” (Sultana, 2022), this paper also strives to imagine climate action beyond the colonial veil towards practices otherwise – those that engender decolonial, anti-colonial, feminist, anti-racist and anti-capitalist possibilities.