Decolonising sustainability: expanding understandings of the SDGs

Viewing the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through a decolonial lens aims to expand our understanding of sustainability, recognising that development is merely one of many possible frameworks for understanding the world. This approach aligns with the broader movement to expand the scope of content and perspectives in decolonising the curriculum – an effort to embrace diverse ways of knowing.

Indeed, sustainable development is only one of many perspectives on sustainability, equality and prosperity. It is a framework full of tensions and contradictions, and like any other world view, it exists among many other bodies of knowledge and ways of understanding the world.  

When discussing decolonisation of the curriculum, a key consideration is the diversity of ideas, concepts and perspectives students engage with in their learning. The SDGs have a dominant presence in educational spaces and are often accepted without question. They are integrated into module descriptions and displayed on posters and banners as symbols of institutional commitment to sustainability. We should ask whether higher education institutions are promoting too narrow a perspective on such a broad and complex issue.

This is not to suggest that educators must become experts in a vast array of sustainability concepts, nor that a diversity of concepts must be embedded into every curriculum. Indeed, the call is not for all educators to become experts in indigenous pedagogies, degrowth principles or post-development thinking. Rather, it is for the creation of more collective and deliberative educational opportunities – spaces where educators and students can grapple with these concepts together, learning collaboratively in forums such as climate and peoples’ assemblies.

In these spaces, ideas such as degrowth can be explored in practical and context-specific ways – examining what it could mean for university emissions, working patterns and globalised education. Through tangible case studies that explore other ways of thinking about a topic such as economic growth, positioned at the heart of the SDGs as an almost inevitable and unbreakable truth, alternative perspectives on the economy can emerge. Moreover, the non-hierarchical nature of assembly spaces, where students, staff and local communities participate as equals, embodies the principles of decolonial and critical pedagogy. It offers a break, however temporary, from traditional top-down teaching models, replacing them with something more dialogic and democratic. 

• Resources on the Sustainable Development Goals
• Teaming up with students to design sustainability education
• Spotlight collection: a greener future for higher education

Furthermore, as universities continue to develop broader curriculum initiatives aimed at addressing global challenges, they would do well to decentre the SDG framework as the default response to environmental, social and economic issues. These large-scale curriculum initiatives, where students work towards solutions to urgent global problems, should not be confined to a single framework. Instead, they could draw from a range of perspectives and world views. 

For instance, principles and practices of social and environmental justice could serve as a framework for critically interrogating development thinking. This means questioning who benefits from and who is harmed by development projects and economic growth and expanding whose voices shape conversations on the development of sustainable solutions. Similarly, ecological conceptions of citizenship offer an alternative to SDGs by shifting the focus away from human-centred narratives of economic development and instead positioning human and non-human life within intersecting, coexisting relationships in a more democratic way.

It makes sense, then, for an expansive sustainability curriculum to actively incorporate these alternative frameworks, particularly within interdisciplinary, grand challenges-style projects – not only to promote intellectual diversity but to recognise that the severity of the challenges we face requires thinking beyond dominant or singular paradigms.

Finally, a decolonial lens must expose the often hidden or under-theorised norms and values that shape sustainable development. The logic of free-market capitalism that is deeply rooted in and inseparable from the legacies of colonialism and imperialism, the dominance of the Global North in development discourses and the ways these dynamics perpetuate historical power imbalances should all be made visible. These complexities should not be hidden behind the 17 branded squares, whose clean and simple design smooths over an intensely complex set of social and economic arrangements.

This does not require an exhaustive or unreasonable overhaul of entire curricula. Instead, it is about helping educators identify gaps where meaningful expansion is possible. This can be as simple as pausing to reflect on whose interests are served by proposed solutions within sustainable development, who has a voice in shaping their communities’ futures and who is excluded from these conversations. Decolonisation urges us to consider where power is concentrated and how it is positioned.

Allegations of human rights abuses in renewable energy projects, exploitative labour conditions in the green economy, land dispossession linked to industrial agriculture, and the intensive mining of lithium and cobalt in the Global South to fuel green energy transitions are just a handful of case studies. These highlight the need to critically examine the power dynamics underpinning sustainable development and to explore alternative, more just pathways forward.

Sean Porter is senior educator developer at the University of Exeter.

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