Decolonising Sustainability: Indigenous Governance in the Age of the Anthropocene
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Abstract
This article explores Indigenous Frafra onto-epistemologies within the ambit of a sustainable development policy framework that better captures the Anthropocene epoch. Frafra onto-epistemologies from northern Ghana and southern Burkina Faso profoundly shape how Indigenous peoples understand and relate to their environment. Their more-than-human entanglements include among other things beliefs, knowledge, and Ancestral practices that reflect a relational approach to life and the cosmos. The analysis presented here is based on an understanding of the concept of the Anthropocene as rejecting modernist ontologies and framings about a split between human and nature. It discusses respectively, the ways in which dominant forms of decolonial critique and epistemic plurality of environmental imaginaries problematise modernist sustainable frameworks and epistemic foundations that separate humans from nature in the Anthropocene as a universalising concept. In conclusion, I argue that the modernist ontologies of separation marginalise sustainability in a multiplicity of ways in the Anthropocene. It is further argued that Indigenous Frafra onto-epistemologies are a necessity if humanity is to survive the diverse ways humans perceive and interact with the Earth and cope with the unprecedented catastrophic ecological destruction largely driven by modernist, anthropocentric, and capitalist land relations.
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