Paper 203: The Postcolonial Studies

Decolonising Climate Justice: Postcolonial Perspectives on Environmental Inequality, Land Dispossession, and Resistance in the Global South in the Anthropocene

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Academic Details: 

Name: Vanita Baraiya 

Roll No: 34

Enrollment No: 5108250002 

Sem: 3

Batch: 2025-2027 

E-mail: vanitabaraiya885@gmail.com

Submitted To: Smt. Sujata Binoy Gardi, Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University 

Submitted date:17 Oct, 2026

Abstract

This paper examines climate justice through a postcolonial lens, arguing that contemporary climate impacts and responses in the Global South cannot be separated from the enduring structures of colonial exploitation, resource extraction, and epistemic domination. Drawing on recent scholarship in African studies, political ecology, environmental politics, and climate litigation, it analyses how climate-related loss, indebtedness, and unequal urban environmental burdens reproduce colonial patterns of dispossession. The study foregrounds African and broader Global South experiences of indigeneity, resilience, and anti-colonial climate politics, while highlighting the role of intersectionality and decolonial research methodologies. It contends that genuine climate justice requires not only redistribution of burdens and benefits but also the decolonisation of knowledge, governance, and identity claims in the Anthropocene. By synthesising theoretical and empirical insights from the selected literature, the paper contributes to postcolonial studies by demonstrating that climate change is both a material continuation of colonial violence and a site of ongoing struggle for epistemic and political liberation. The analysis reveals that climate colonialism operates across multiple scales—from local land enclosures to global governance architectures—and that decolonial approaches offer pathways to reconfigure these power relations.

Research Question

How do postcolonial structures of power continue to shape climate-related dispossession, environmental inequality, and knowledge production in the Global South, and in what ways can decolonial approaches to climate justice challenge and transform these structures?

Hypothesis

Postcolonial legacies of extraction, racialised hierarchy, and epistemic marginalisation actively produce and intensify climate vulnerability and injustice in the Global South. Consequently, effective climate justice demands not only material redistribution but also the Africanisation and decolonisation of indigeneity, resilience narratives, and global climate governance frameworks. Without such epistemic and political transformation, climate policies risk reproducing colonial relations under the guise of sustainability and adaptation.

Main Body

Introduction

Climate change is frequently framed as a universal, future-oriented crisis requiring technocratic and multilateral solutions. International climate negotiations, scientific assessments, and policy discourses often present the Anthropocene as a shared planetary condition that transcends historical particularities. Postcolonial studies, however, insist that the Anthropocene is neither neutral nor new: its material and discursive foundations rest on centuries of colonial appropriation of land, labour, and knowledge (Wilkens & Datchoua-Tirvaudey, 2022). The references assembled for this assignment collectively demonstrate that climate impacts—loss of land, rising indebtedness, urban environmental inequality, and contested resilience discourses—reproduce and reconfigure colonial relations between Global North and Global South. This paper therefore situates climate justice within postcolonial theory, treating the climate crisis as both a continuation of colonial violence and a terrain of anti-colonial contestation.

The argument proceeds in five interconnected stages. First, it outlines the conceptual foundations of climate colonialism and global climate justice, showing how historical patterns of extraction persist in contemporary environmental inequalities. Second, it examines empirical processes of land dispossession and climate-related loss, with particular attention to Southeast Asian and broader Global South contexts. Third, it analyses the politics of knowledge, indigeneity, and resilience, focusing on efforts to Africanise and decolonise these categories. Fourth, it explores intersectionality as a critical lens for understanding differentiated vulnerability. Fifth, it considers emerging forms of resistance, including climate litigation and anti-colonial climate movements. Throughout, the paper maintains that decolonisation is not an optional ethical add-on but a necessary condition for any substantive climate justice. The analysis draws exclusively on the provided scholarship to demonstrate how postcolonial theory illuminates the structural production of climate injustice and the possibilities for transformative resistance.

Climate Colonialism and the Architecture of Environmental Injustice

The concept of climate colonialism captures the ways in which historical patterns of extraction and racialised hierarchy are reactivated under the banner of climate action or climate impact. Balaraj (2025) frames climate colonialism as a process of exploitation, dispossession, and environmental injustice that systematically disadvantages the Global South. This perspective resonates with longer postcolonial critiques of development and environmentalism that treat the South as a resource frontier and a sacrifice zone. Climate colonialism is not merely a metaphor; it describes concrete mechanisms through which historical colonial relations are extended into the present. These include the unequal distribution of emissions and impacts, the extraction of resources for Northern consumption and green technologies, and the imposition of adaptation and mitigation frameworks that prioritise Northern interests and knowledge systems.

Corvino and Andina (2023) provide a broader theoretical mapping of global climate justice, distinguishing between distributive, corrective, and procedural dimensions. From a postcolonial standpoint, distributive approaches that focus solely on emissions shares or adaptation funding remain insufficient if they leave intact the underlying political economy of unequal ecological exchange. Corrective justice, which seeks to address historical responsibility, is often diluted in international negotiations by the refusal of major historical emitters to accept liability. Procedural justice, concerning participation in decision-making, is undermined by the structural dominance of Northern institutions, funding streams, and expertise. Gonenc (2025) extends this critique by situating climate justice debates within critical sustainability discourse in international relations. Gonenc emphasises that Global South perspectives often challenge the universalising assumptions of Northern-led frameworks, revealing how sustainability discourse can mask ongoing forms of domination and extraction.

Empirical evidence of structural inequality is stark and multi-scalar. Li et al. (2025) document multiple environmental inequalities between Global South and Global North urban centres across more than 10,000 cities. Their findings reveal persistent disparities in exposure to pollution, green space, and climate risks that cannot be explained by contemporary economic variables alone. These patterns echo colonial urban planning legacies in which indigenous and racialised populations were concentrated in ecologically marginal spaces while colonial elites occupied privileged environments. In the Anthropocene, such spatial inequalities are intensified by climate change, producing what can be termed “layered dispossession”—the simultaneous experience of historical land loss and contemporary climate vulnerability. Urban heat islands, flooding, and air pollution disproportionately affect informal settlements and historically marginalised neighbourhoods, reproducing colonial geographies of risk under new climatic conditions.

The architecture of climate colonialism also operates through global value chains and financial instruments. Resource extraction for renewable energy technologies, carbon offset projects, and industrial agriculture frequently occurs in the Global South under conditions that replicate colonial patterns of land alienation and labour exploitation. Balaraj’s (2025) analysis of exploitation and dispossession underscores that climate solutions themselves can become vehicles for new forms of enclosure and accumulation. When climate action is framed primarily as a technical or market-based problem, the political and historical dimensions of injustice are sidelined. Postcolonial theory insists that these dimensions must remain central: climate change is not an external shock arriving on a level playing field but a crisis generated by and generative of unequal power relations that stretch back to the colonial era.

Land Dispossession, Indebtedness, and the Production of Climate-Related Loss

A central contribution of recent political ecology scholarship is the demonstration that climate-related loss is actively produced rather than merely suffered. Dorkenoo and Res (2026) analyse land dispossession, indebtedness, and climate change in northeastern Cambodia. Their study shows how climate impacts interact with processes of enclosure, debt relations, and state-facilitated land conversion to generate cascading losses for rural communities. Climate change does not simply arrive as an external shock; it is mediated by existing property regimes and financial instruments that often originate in or are reinforced by postcolonial state formation and global capital. In the Cambodian case, droughts, floods, and changing rainfall patterns exacerbate the vulnerabilities created by land concessions, debt-driven agricultural intensification, and the erosion of customary tenure systems. Farmers lose land not only to extreme weather but to the combined pressures of climate stress and structural indebtedness.

This insight travels beyond Cambodia and illuminates broader patterns across the Global South. Across much of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, smallholder farmers and indigenous communities confront a triple pressure: historical dispossession of ancestral lands, contemporary expansion of agribusiness or conservation enclosures, and climate-induced crop failure or extreme weather. The resulting indebtedness frequently forces further land sales, migration, or entry into precarious wage labour, locking communities into cycles of vulnerability. From a postcolonial perspective, these dynamics constitute a contemporary form of primitive accumulation in which climate stress accelerates the conversion of communal or customary tenure into private, often foreign-controlled, property. The production of climate-related loss is therefore inseparable from the political economy of land and debt.

Paudel et al. (2024), in their review of postcolonial political ecologies of climate change justice and global resource commons, underline the multi-scalar nature of these processes. Local land struggles are inextricably linked to global circuits of capital, carbon markets, and resource extraction. The “commons” that are being enclosed are not only material—forests, water, pastures—but also epistemic: the knowledge systems that once regulated sustainable use are displaced by expert-driven adaptation and mitigation schemes. Carbon forestry projects, for example, often reclassify community forests as carbon sinks whose primary value lies in offsetting Northern emissions, thereby subordinating local livelihoods and ecological relationships to global market logics. Postcolonial political ecology reveals that climate justice cannot be achieved through technical fixes or market mechanisms alone; it requires confronting the historical and ongoing enclosure of both land and knowledge.

The production of loss also has temporal dimensions. Colonial dispossession created lasting inequalities in access to land, water, and institutional power. These inequalities condition the capacity of communities to adapt to climate change. When extreme weather events destroy crops or homes, households with insecure tenure or high debt burdens are least able to recover. The result is a cumulative process in which climate impacts deepen historical inequalities, and historical inequalities amplify climate impacts. Dorkenoo and Res (2026) demonstrate that understanding climate-related loss requires attention to these intertwined processes of dispossession and indebtedness. Climate justice, in this light, is not only about compensation for loss and damage but about transforming the structural conditions that produce loss in the first place.

Decolonising Knowledge, Indigeneity, and Resilience

One of the most generative strands in the literature concerns the politics of knowledge and identity. Amponsah and Amo-Agyemang (2026) advance the concept of “Africanising Indigeneity,” arguing for the decolonisation of identities, knowledges, and resilience narratives in the Anthropocene. Their intervention is crucial because dominant climate discourses often appropriate indigenous knowledge in instrumental ways—treating it as a local resource to be extracted and integrated into global adaptation toolkits—while simultaneously denying indigenous communities political sovereignty over land and decision-making. Africanising indigeneity challenges both colonial stereotypes of African societies as lacking “true” indigeneity (a category historically reserved for settler-colonial contexts) and neoliberal resilience frameworks that individualise responsibility for adaptation.

Colonial classifications of indigeneity were never neutral. In many African contexts, colonial administrations constructed hierarchies of “native” and “settler,” “tribal” and “modern,” that continue to shape postcolonial land politics and development interventions. Amponsah and Amo-Agyemang (2026) contend that reclaiming and Africanising indigeneity involves centring African cosmologies, communal land ethics, and historical experiences of resistance as foundations for climate justice. This move refuses the reduction of African knowledge systems to quaint local practices and instead positions them as sophisticated, historically grounded frameworks for relating to land, water, and climate. Resilience, in this reframing, is not an individual capacity to bounce back from shocks but a collective, historically informed practice of survival and transformation under conditions of structural violence.

Wilkens and Datchoua-Tirvaudey (2022) explicitly advocate a decolonial approach to researching climate justice and global climate governance. They critique the dominance of Northern academic institutions, funding streams, and conceptual categories, arguing that these reproduce colonial hierarchies of knowledge. A decolonial methodology requires not only the inclusion of Southern scholars but a fundamental reorientation of research questions, methods, and criteria of validity toward Southern realities and intellectual traditions. This includes questioning the universal applicability of concepts such as “adaptation,” “vulnerability,” and “resilience,” which often carry implicit Northern assumptions about what constitutes successful or desirable change. Decolonial research seeks to unsettle these assumptions and to generate knowledge that is accountable to the communities most affected by climate injustice.

The politics of knowledge also shape global climate governance. International climate institutions and scientific bodies have historically privileged certain forms of expertise—climate modelling, economic cost-benefit analysis, and Western legal frameworks—while marginalising indigenous and Southern knowledge systems. Even when indigenous knowledge is formally recognised, it is often treated as supplementary data rather than as a legitimate basis for decision-making and sovereignty. Amponsah and Amo-Agyemang’s (2026) call to Africanise indigeneity, combined with Wilkens and Datchoua-Tirvaudey’s (2022) decolonial research agenda, points toward a more radical transformation: the restructuring of climate knowledge production so that Southern and indigenous epistemologies are not merely included but become constitutive of climate justice frameworks.

Intersectionality and Differentiated Vulnerability

Intersectionality further complicates these dynamics and is essential for a rigorous postcolonial analysis of climate justice. Mikulewicz et al. (2023) call for synergy between intersectionality and climate justice scholarship. Gender, class, ethnicity, caste, and generation mediate exposure to climate risk and capacity to respond. In postcolonial settings, these axes of difference are themselves products of colonial classifications and postcolonial state policies. An intersectional decolonial analysis therefore refuses both universalising victimhood narratives and simplistic celebrations of “community resilience,” insisting instead on the differentiated and power-laden nature of vulnerability and agency.

Colonial rule reconfigured gender relations, property rights, and labour regimes in ways that continue to shape climate vulnerability. Women in many Global South contexts bear disproportionate burdens of water collection, food production, and care work, all of which are intensified by climate stress. At the same time, colonial and postcolonial legal systems often restricted women’s land rights, leaving them with weaker claims to resources and decision-making power. Class and ethnicity intersect with these gendered dynamics: rural poor, indigenous, and ethnic minority communities frequently face compounded forms of exclusion. Mikulewicz et al. (2023) argue that climate justice scholarship must engage these intersections more systematically, moving beyond additive approaches that simply list multiple vulnerabilities toward analyses of how power relations mutually constitute one another.

An intersectional lens also reveals the limitations of resilience discourses that ignore structural inequalities. When resilience is framed as a community or individual attribute, it can obscure the ways in which some groups are systematically exposed to risk while others are protected. Postcolonial intersectionality insists that vulnerability is produced through historical and ongoing relations of power. Climate justice, therefore, requires not only technical adaptation measures but the transformation of the social relations that distribute risk unevenly. This includes addressing gendered land rights, ethnic discrimination, and class-based exclusion as integral components of climate policy.

Resistance, Litigation, and Anti-Colonial Climate Politics

Despite structural constraints, the Global South is a site of vigorous climate justice activism and legal innovation. Murcott and Tigre (2024) survey developments, opportunities, and complexities in Global South climate litigation. Courts in countries across the Global South have issued landmark rulings that link constitutional rights, intergenerational equity, and environmental protection. These cases often draw on postcolonial constitutional traditions and indigenous rights frameworks, thereby challenging the procedural and substantive biases of international climate law. Climate litigation in the Global South frequently centres questions of historical responsibility, the rights of nature, and the obligations of both states and corporations, expanding the conceptual and legal repertoire of climate justice beyond the frameworks dominant in Northern jurisdictions.

Beyond the courtroom, civil society movements articulate anti-colonial climate politics. Sunnemark (2024) examines how global civil society actors frame post-apocalyptic environmentalism and struggle for anti-colonial climate politics within the broader climate movement. Such articulations reject both the apocalyptic fatalism sometimes found in Northern environmentalism and the technocratic optimism of green growth paradigms. Instead, they demand systemic transformation that addresses historical responsibility, reparations, and the dismantling of extractive relations. Anti-colonial climate politics insists that the climate crisis cannot be solved within the existing architecture of global capitalism and colonial modernity; it requires a fundamental reconfiguration of power, knowledge, and resource relations.

These forms of resistance illustrate that climate justice is not merely a demand for fairer distribution of adaptation finance or technology transfer. It is a struggle over the very terms of political community, sovereignty, and knowledge in the Anthropocene. Postcolonial theory helps us recognise that the “global” in global climate governance remains deeply stratified, and that genuine universality can only emerge through the prioritisation of those historically rendered peripheral. The scholarship on litigation and social movements demonstrates that the Global South is not only a site of vulnerability but also a source of conceptual and political innovation. By centring Southern experiences and anti-colonial demands, these movements challenge the coloniality of climate governance and open possibilities for more just futures.

Conclusion

The literature examined in this paper converges on a clear diagnosis: climate injustice in the Global South is inseparable from the unfinished business of decolonisation. Climate colonialism operates through land dispossession and indebtedness (Dorkenoo & Res, 2026), through persistent urban environmental inequalities (Li et al., 2025), through the marginalisation of African and other Southern knowledge systems (Amponsah & Amo-Agyemang, 2026; Wilkens & Datchoua-Tirvaudey, 2022), and through the limitations of dominant justice frameworks (Balaraj, 2025; Corvino & Andina, 2023; Gonenc, 2025). Intersectionality reveals the differentiated nature of vulnerability (Mikulewicz et al., 2023), while litigation and social movements demonstrate the potential for resistance and transformation (Murcott & Tigre, 2024; Sunnemark, 2024). Paudel et al. (2024) further underscore the multi-scalar connections between local dispossession and global resource commons.

At the same time, the scholarship points toward transformative possibilities. Africanising indigeneity, intersectional analysis, Global South climate litigation, and anti-colonial climate movements all offer pathways for reconfiguring power relations. The research question posed at the outset—how postcolonial structures shape climate injustice and how decolonial approaches can challenge them—finds its answer in the recognition that climate change is a colonial present as much as a planetary future. Only by confronting that colonial present can climate justice become more than a managerial adjustment of an unjust order.

For postcolonial studies, the Anthropocene therefore constitutes both a challenge and an opportunity: a challenge because environmental crisis risks recentring Northern expertise and universalist narratives, and an opportunity because it forces a reckoning with the material and epistemic legacies of empire that postcolonial theory has long sought to illuminate. Future research should continue to bridge empirical political ecology, decolonial theory, and legal-political practice, ensuring that the voices and knowledges of the Global South remain central to the struggle for a just climate future. The hypothesis advanced in this paper that postcolonial legacies actively produce climate vulnerability and that effective justice requires decolonisation of knowledge and governance is strongly supported by the evidence. Without such transformation, climate policies will continue to reproduce the inequalities they claim to address.

References

Amponsah, C., & Amo-Agyemang, C. (2026). Africanising Indigeneity: Decolonising identities, knowledges, and resilience in the Anthropocene. African Studies, 85(1), 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/00020184.2026.2643608

Balaraj, S. (2025). Climate colonialism: Exploitation, dispossession, and environmental injustice in the Global South [Working paper]. SSRN. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5254487

Corvino, F., & Andina, T. (2023). Global climate justice: Theory and practice. E-International Relations.

Dorkenoo, K., & Res, P. (2026). On the production of climate-related loss: Land dispossession, indebtedness, and climate change in northeastern Cambodia. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 53(3), 503–532. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2025.2528861

Gonenc, D. (2025). Climate justice in the Global South. In Ş. Güdek-Gölçek, G. Durmaz, & A. İnan-Şimşek (Eds.), Critical approach to sustainability discourse and action in international relations (pp. 231–264). IGI Global Scientific Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4018/979-8-3373-1707-6.ch007

Li, W., Wei, Y., Chen, L., et al. (2025). Multiple environmental inequalities between Global South and Global North in over 10,000 urban centers. npj Urban Sustainability, 5, 111. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-025-00302-z

Mikulewicz, M., Caretta, M. A., Sultana, F., & Crawford, N. J. W. (2023). Intersectionality & climate justice: A call for synergy in climate change scholarship. Environmental Politics, 32(7), 1275–1286. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2023.2172869

Murcott, M. J., & Tigre, M. A. (2024). Developments, opportunities, and complexities in Global South climate litigation: Introduction to the special collection. Journal of Human Rights Practice, 16(1), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1093/jhuman/huad070

Paudel, D., Derman, B., Murton, G., Rampini, C., & Joshi, S. (2024). Climate change justice and global resource commons: Local and global postcolonial political ecologies [Review of the book by S. Joshi]. The AAG Review of Books, 12(2), 31–42. https://doi.org/10.1080/2325548X.2024.2315334

Sunnemark, L. (2024). Articulating post-apocalyptic environmentalism: Global civil society and the struggle for anti-colonial climate politics in the climate movement. Globalizations, 21(5), 839–856. https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2023.2288405

Wilkens, J., & Datchoua-Tirvaudey, A. (2022). Researching climate justice: A decolonial approach to global climate governance. International Affairs, 98(1), 125–143. https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiab209