Decolonisation and Development

A conversation with Dr. Lata Narayanaswamy, University of Leeds, UK

In Spring 2023, GIZ’s Knowledge Management and Learning Team are inviting different experts to explore issues of Knowledge, Power and Diversity in the field of development cooperation.

What knowledge informs our development approaches? Whose knowledge counts? How might we integrate local knowledge into our work? And what might we learn from indigenous knowledge systems in the search for truly sustainable solutions? In a ten-part series, we will discuss questions of local, decolonised, indigenous and intergenerational knowledge systems and their role in reimagining development cooperation.

This is a summary of our first session about “Decolonisation and Development” with Dr. Lata Narayanaswamy from the University of Leeds in the UK. The summary is not a full and complete recitation of the whole conversation, but instead highlights a few takeaways.

Discussions around decolonisation are very often uncomfortable — but we need to confront the discomfort.

Discussions around decolonisation are often very uncomfortable, as many people join the sector of development cooperation in order to be on the right side of history. Nobody works in the development sector with the intention to make the world a worse place. But we must confront this discomfort because we have to work through the historical legacies that colonialism has given us, and we have to acknowledge the historical wrongs (e.g., legacies of racism and inequalities). This is the start of an important discussion, and we need to be honest about our shared past. Against this backdrop, questions of decolonisation should be seen as a continuous process rather than a singular or precise outcome. It is the start of a conversation and a process of learning and listening to each other.

Colonialism is OUR story.

There is a tendency in the intellectual and practical development space to think of coloniality as something that is only relevant to development; that development is invariably only about how European colonialism happened in places far away, mainly had negative consequences for brown and black bodies, and most of these things occurred mainly in the past. If there is one takeaway message from the conversation today, then it is this: Colonialism is OUR story. It is irredeemably shaping how ALL of us live now. All forms of colonialism and legacies of European empires are of the most consequence for us now. One way to start this discussion is to understand how the continuities of European imperialism still operate today. This is very important in the context of knowledge management because our understanding of how we know the world, which we often see as fairly fixed, is linked to colonial legacies and continuities. If we don’t put this in a historical context, we miss the way we live in colonial legacies and the continuities of European empires, in turn limiting our imaginations in terms of how we might solve on-going and multiple crises.

Colonial legacies and continuities

A quick way to summarize the key concerns around colonialism is to draw out the continuities and legacies of empires. The system we are calling “development” or “aid” is in a fact an extension of the colonial system. What we see as the post-World War two settlements and very often what we call development was implemented by redeploying colonial area officers. So literally after a country declared independence, colonial officials changed their nameplate on the door and became technical development officers. It is the same person and doing actually quite similar things. These people then formed the system we all work in today, that we have come to call the Bretton-Woods-System. The colonial legacies and continuities may also be observed in the persistent of racism, gender inequality (e.g., the gender division of labour), unequal trading regimes and the on-going climate crisis. The collective consumption of the Global North for example is many times more carbon-intensive, but the consequences of a warming world leading to severe and frequent weather events and sea-level rise are felt more acutely in the Global South.

We do not have a time machine.

So, what does this mean for us now? We cannot pretend that these issues of our shared colonial past are indeed in a distant past that has nothing to do with us now. What is needed is a frank and honest reckoning about our shared colonial past which will support dialogue to recognise and address the persistence of those colonial logics that have divided up our world into haves and have-nots, underpinned by toxic and persistent gender, wealth and race inequalities. And here is where the question of how we know the world and the language of decolonisation becomes so important. We cannot undo the past — we do not have a time machine. What we need to do instead is to understand how these deeply embedded colonial logics are operating in the world around us now. If we do not do this, we risk undermining the very real progress that has been made around global goals, like the SDGs, that are at least an attempt to have a global conversation around the kind of world we might collectively envision. We are not responsible for the violent past of European empires but what we can and should do is hold each other responsible for how we choose to respond to harmful legacies of empires that we still live with.

The colonial dynamics are continuously reproduced.

Whilst it is important to start with a more in-depth understanding of European colonialism, we also need to reflect on the ways in which (neo)coloniality still manifests today. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a good example of a (neo)colonial dynamic. The historical legacies are a starting point to build understanding but we never really moved out of those dynamics. The colonial dynamics are continuously reproducing themselves.

Promising steps: Acknowledging the harms and focusing on genuine cooperation.

First, the development sector can at least signal the start of a better conversation by acknowledging the harms of colonial legacies. This is our collective task. This would mean that we can stop thinking about development and the associated language of aid and charity. It makes the global North seem benevolent. And this is not what dealing with colonial legacies is about. It is and should be about acknowledging harm. Development aid is not benevolence but acknowledging harm. The Loss and Damage Fund to support Global South countries to deal with the consequences of climate changes is a promising initiative for example even if there are still a lot of open questions. If we acknowledge the harm and legacies of the past, we can have a discussion about what that Loss and Damage Fund might look like.

Second, genuine cooperation is actually about knowledge. Whose knowledge counts? How do we reorient the way we think about where valuable knowledge comes from? These questions are crucial. We could see during the COVID-19 pandemic that the only knowledge considered valuable was still coming from the research centres of the donor offices of global North countries. Many Global North countries overlooked that in many African countries there was great research and many lessons learned with knowledge gained on the ground from managing many epidemics, including most recently Ebola.

So, how do we listen to the people we haven’t listened to? How do we convince more people in power to listen? It is about cooperation with humility and developing the capacity to learn and listen. We are not the arbiter of any truth. We need to work out a way of listening to all sorts of views and bring people into those conversations. The challenge for us collectively is how do we convince our institutions to take those efforts seriously.

We need to come together, build that collective voice, and make a demand. Make this demand with clarity. Widening who gets to be part of the conversation is a good start.

Questions to ponder:

1. What would it mean for us to acknowledge the contemporary legacies of historical harms?

2. What would genuine cooperation around global crises, like the COVID-19 pandemic, look like?

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Dr. Lata Narayanaswamy:

Since 2001 Dr. Lata Narayanaswamy has worked as a research practitioner, consultant and now an academic working at the nexus between development theory and practice. Her research critically reflects on gendered/intersectional and post/decolonial dynamics of development knowledge and its perceived contribution to addressing global development challenges. She is currently involved in applied, interdisciplinary research related to gender/feminism/intersectionality as these relate to climate change, water security and decolonising development.

She is currently involved in applied, interdisciplinary research funded by the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) and the EU related to gender and climate change, water security and decolonising development. She is also the Vice Chair of the COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) project on ‘Decolonising Development: Research, Teaching and Practice (DecolDEV)’.