#POLLEN24 – Call for papers “Green transitions as decolonization”

POLLEN24 in Lund invites abstracts for papers that address issues around green transition, nature restoration, and open-ended approaches to nature management and climate mitigation through the lens of decolonization theory. More information about this CfP, including its rationale, deadline, and contacts below.

POLLEN24 – 10-12 June 2024, Lund- Sweden

In our time, climate change and environmental degradation are cast as existential threats, rendering green transitions imperative to ensure that human activity is sustainable in the long term. In response, governments, state agencies and civil society associations around the world have embarked a range of initiatives for nature conservation/restoration, resource optimization and climate mitigation. These projects have both anticipated and unanticipated impacts on local landscapes and livelihoods, and some may seek to disrupt long-held assumptions and modes of governing land and life.  

Green transition projects may for example entail deliberate human withdrawal, abandonment, willed decay or decline in/from specific areas of larger or smaller expansion. They may involve rewilding of nature and removal of infrastructures associated with industrial agriculture and forestry such as dikes, drainage pipes and other landscaping elements that have historically enabled agricultural expansion and colonization. Such projects appear as reversals of historical colonization processes, going against the growth paradigm and its reliance on expansion and intensification. They may also imply a rethinking of relations within state bureaucracies, between statutory institutions, farmers/foresters and local populations, and between human beings and other species, making room for other forms and genres of knowledge to flourish in the in the co-creation of future landscapes. This may challenge existing (colonial/imperial) knowledge hierarchies and ways of understanding what nature and nature management is about.

This panel will look at green transition, nature restoration and open-ended approaches to nature management and climate mitigation through the lens of decolonization theory. Can such interventions be seen as processes of decolonization? To what extent do they reverse historical colonization processes or colonial ways of thinking about nature? And are existing knowledge hierarchies challenged through collaborative processes and open-ended approaches to nature management?

We invite papers that engage constructively and critically with these questions and inquire into the decolonizing potential of climate, biodiversity and nature restoration projects. Papers can explore cases that involve biophysical, infrastructural and landscape changes, challenge knowledge hierarchies, historical narratives and engrained perceptions of change, or that in other ways entail the disruption of legacies of colonial power and colonization processes. Papers may for example draw on feminist, critical race, multispecies, materialist or narrative approaches to address epistemological and ontological questions about knowledge and governance. Taken together, the panel seeks to draw on cases from global souths as well as global norths to create dialogue about knowledge, decolonization and relations of power in the green transition.

Abstracts for this panel should be max. 200 words and should be submitted by email, by 5 December 2023 to Inge-Merete Hougaard (imh@anthro.ku.dk). Please include name and institution in the email, as well as which of the three conference locations you will preferably be presenting from. The panel will be hosted in the Lund conference hub, but we welcome papers from Dodoma and Lima to create a hybrid panel. By 11 December 2023 you will receive information whether your paper is part of the panel. We will then compile the papers and submit the panel proposal by the deadline 15 December 2023.