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

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 and activists and are at the vanguard of this research, and many approaches have coalesced around theories of ‘degrowth’ and ‘post-growth’, which 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. 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. While some research connecting postgrowth theories with existing environmental justice movements has begun in Latin America and South Asia, almost no research has been conducted in sub-Saharan Africa. This project therefore proposes to work on environmental justice movements in Africa using novel participatory methods that engage African activists and scholars. The overall aim is to develop this research into a novel paradigm (post-growth anthropology) which prioritizes decolonial methods. To contribute to this novel paradigm, ethnographic research will be conducted with environmental movements which have challenged ‘growthism’ and ‘green development’ in urban and rural Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)