EcoSImies of care: a proposal for decolonizing ‘sustainable development’

This article focuses on questions of power, colonialism and capitalist relations in order to understand
and disrupt the dominant discourse and project of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. I
analyse the mainstream sustainable development conceptual framework (WB 2012; UN 2015; UNDP
2016) and argue that it has become profoundly problematic, even seriously unthinkable, to do good
work under the current ‘development’ framework, with its modernist and extractivist premises of
bounded individualism and human exceptionalism. There is urgent need for new discourses and
modes of representation that shift resource-related debates to open platforms for engaged, decolonized,
and decentralized public discourse. Drawing on feminist, indigenous, decolonial art and critical
environmentalist knowledges, I propose here an ‘ecoSImies of care’ as a way to think beyond the
dead end of sustainable development green capitalism and resurrect a ‘limit to growth’ and sustainability
of life discourse and practices. In this sense, ecoSImies of care open a radical way of imagining
the economy and economics as multiple, inter-eco-dependent, polyvocal, and as bringing together
social-political insights in a contextual and situated manner.