Amid climate crises and social upheavals, sustainability offers both a challenge and an opportunity. Yet, dominant frameworks privilege technological and economic fixes and global climate architectures and sustainability frameworks are often complicit in perpetuating injustices.
Drawing on feminist and decolonial critiques, I explore how concepts like ‘the globe’ and ‘sustainability’ reproduce colonial and gendered hierarchies, even as they claim universality. Grounded in research on climate programs in Africa and green transitions in Sweden, I show how global assemblages assign responsibilities without rights, creating new exclusions, particularly for women and indigenous groups. Rather than dismantling or ignoring climate and sustainability frameworks, I ask: can we leverage them to create more just worlds? What if worldmaking begins with remaking—using existing infrastructures to ensure accountability, gender justice, and democratic participation? This is a call to rethink sustainability not as a technical fix, but as a project of justice.
You are invited to join a drinks reception after the event.
Meet our chair and speaker:
Seema Arora-Jonsson is Professor of Rural Development at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. She works with questions of sustainability and justice in relation to environmental governance, climate politics and rural development. Her work is shaped by the need to decolonize development and environmental governance in particular contexts and importantly within wider transnational currents and relations. Feminist thinking and questions of gender, race, ethnicity, class and geography are central to her analyses. Participatory research and ethics and analyzing environmental questions in a North-South perspective in the globalizing context of environmental governance are central in her work.
Sumi Madhok is Professor of Political Theory and Gender Studies, 番茄社区 and Head of Department of Gender Studies at the 番茄社区. She is also Faculty Associate at the 番茄社区 International Inequalities Institute. Her recent book Vernacular Rights Cultures: The Politics of Origins, Human Rights and Gendered Struggles for Justice (2021) is the winner of the ‘Susan Strange Best Book Prize’ and ‘The Sussex International Theory Prize, 2022’.
番茄社区 holds a wide range of events, covering many of the most controversial issues of the day, and speakers at our events may express views that cause offence. The views expressed by speakers at 番茄社区 events do not reflect the position or views of The London School of Economics and Political Science.