Decolonial Futures: The Politics of Environmental Justice Beyond the Anthropocene

Abstract (English)

Decoloniality, as an epistemic tradition, is both a political and praxeological movement grounded in the belief that all knowledge is first local before it becomes global. It links epistemic disobedience with actionable alternatives aimed at restoring devastated ecologies and rehumanising systems of thought and practice. In this regard, the politics of repair, restoration, and reparation is not limited to addressing the immediate wellbeing of the body, mind, and environment, but also engages in a broader temporal project – seeking closure with a colonially ruptured past while signaling safeguarded and decolonial future. Beyond repair of the present, what kind of future is being imagined, and for whom, in dominant environmental and climate discourses? This paper argues that the current global polycrisis – climate change, ecological degradation, and social inequality – has been midwifed by a Euro-North American-centric model of development and modernity. It critiques the Anthropocene’s hegemonic framing of nature as commodity – something to be conquered, consumed, or technologically overcome – and questions the epistemological assumptions underpinning mainstream climate imaginaries. These dominant frameworks tend to reproduce a future that is neither pluriversal nor globally shared, offering modernist solutions to modernist problems, without accounting for their ontological origins and modernist exhaustion. Anchored in the decolonial paradigm, this paper introduces and interrogates the politics of repair, restoration, and reparation through three analytical axes: epistemic repair, ontological restoration, and futural reparation. The paper contends that any meaningful discourse on global futures must address the coloniality of the future – that is, the tendency of dominant paradigms to reproduce Eurocentric, unilinear, monocultural trajectories of time, technology, and development. The paper calls for a re-grounding of ecological and climate futures in decolonial ethics, where the future is neither universalised nor predetermined, but open to multiple, interrelated pathways that embrace justice, dignity, and the relationality of all beings.