The Age of Transition: Postdevelopment and North-South Synergies

Abstract

The development enterprise has deepened the maladaptation of a social order built on the values of modernity and coloniality. Postcolonial scholars critiqued the discourses that were perpetuating its failures. Latin American decolonial scholars sharpened the analysis, rejecting Eurocentric frames of thought and drawing on a plurality of voices and ways of knowing. Mounting evidence of global socio-ecological interdependence has led to the emergence of discourses of transition advocating a break with the civilizational model of the modern West. Buen vivir and postextractivism are two Latin American examples of these discourses. Although there are divergences between these and Northern transition discourses, the scale of civilizational transition renders dialogue imperative. A review of the path of Latin American critical thought raises the possibility of North-South synergies, highlighting the implications of a true dialogue of ways of knowing.

El proyecto del desarrollo ha profundizado la mala adaptación de un orden social construido sobre los valores de la modernidad y la colonialidad. Los analistas poscoloniales hicieron una crítica de los discursos que perpetuaban dichos fracasos. Los académicos descoloniales latinoamericanos fueron más allá, rechazando marcos de pensamiento eurocéntricos y recurriendo a una pluralidad de voces y formas de saber. La creciente evidencia en torno a la interdependencia socioecológica global ha llevado a la aparición de discursos de transición que abogan por una ruptura con el modelo civilizatorio del Occidente moderno. El buen vivir y el posextractivismo son dos ejemplos latinoamericanos de estos discursos. Aunque hay divergencias entre ellos y los discursos de transición del Norte, la escala de la transición civilizatoria exige el diálogo. Una revisión de la línea de pensamiento crítico latinoamericano plantea la posibilidad de sinergias Norte-Sur, destacando las implicaciones de un verdadero diálogo de saberes.

Development has gone through several waves of critique since the inaugural address of Harry S. Truman in 1949 from which the term “underdeveloped” launched a hegemonic discourse (Escobar, 1995). Postcolonial and decolonial scholars have emphasized the impacts of Western domination on the geopolitical structures, society-nature relations, and patterns of the mind that shape development. Scholars have written extensively on development’s failures, contradictions, and tendency toward othering (see Saunders, 2002). The earliest critiques of development, emerging from structural and dependency theory, brought attention to increasing inequalities and the need to bridge the gap between center and periphery (Cardoso, 1977; Furtado, 1964; Sunkel, 1990). Later, poststructuralist Foucauldian analysis deconstructed the very notion of development, questioning its basis and detailing the dialectic nature of development discourse (Escobar, 1995). Members of this group asserted that the crisis of development was evident, that development had effectively “died,” and that a postdevelopment agenda was necessary (see Rahnema and Bawtree, 1997).

Latin American scholars who were initially inspired by the postcolonial paradigm broke off to establish the decolonial research program. Moving away from poststructuralism and postmodernism, building on the traditions of dependency theory, liberation theology, and participatory action research, and nurtured by indigenous and Afro-descendant worldviews (Gómez, 2014), this group sought to trace development’s failures to Eurocentric, patriarchal patterns of thought inherited from modernity and coloniality (Escobar, 2003; Unceta, 2009). Seeking to change the patterns of academic knowledge generation, decolonial scholars collaborated with civil society, social organizations, and activists to forge a rich and distinct corpus of thought from and with the subaltern (Grosfoguel, 2007).

It is through these collaborations that the decolonial program has entered conversation with discourses of transition that advocate a civilizational transition toward a more just and sustainable social order. Buen vivir and postextractivism are two examples of transition discourses that have emerged from the Latin American context. In an effort to transcend difference and critique, scholars have identified a potential synergy between transition discourses of the North and the South (Beling et al., 2018; Demaria and Kothari, 2017; Escobar, 2015) and called for bridging the divide, recognizing that the emancipatory potential of transition discourses requires changes both in Latin America and in the Global North (Brand, 2019). It is still unclear how these alternative proposals will build a common framework of thought and action leading to the change they propose. Recent contributions by decolonial scholars on the role of religion and spirituality in civilizational transition are particularly relevant in this regard. This article traces the path of Latin American critical thought, from postcolonial and decolonial theories to transition discourses, and explores the possibility of North-South synergies, highlighting the implications of a true dialogue of knowledges.

Postdevelopment and the Decolonial Program

To understand the decolonial program’s unique contributions and its role in shaping Latin American transition discourses, it is important to trace it to its origins in postcolonial scholarship. Although the difference between postcolonial and decolonial theory may not be evident at first glance, there are particularities in the differences between them (Gómez, 2014). Whereas postcolonial theory relates to poststructuralist critique and the application of the theory of modernity to an understanding of the reality of the Third World, it considers modernity the inevitable way forward (Gómez, 2014). Latin American scholars influenced by this line of thought formed the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group in 1995. Its “inaugural manifesto” stated that the subaltern studies group and journal led by Ranajit Guha, a leading postcolonial historian, had inspired members to establish a similar project (Pinedo, 2016). ¹ In 1998 a conference of South Asian and Latin American subaltern studies scholars held at Duke University led to several publications in the journal Nepantla, but the collaborations were short-lived. The group became divided between those who read subalternity through the theoretical lens of European thinkers and those who read it from the perspective of silenced knowledges (Grosfoguel, 2007). Walter Mignolo claimed that the postcolonial theories generated by Indian scholars through Western epistemologies could not be used to analyze the colonial situation in Latin America (Pinedo, 2016). The 1998 meeting was therefore the last meeting before the group split, with Mignolo spearheading the creation of the Coloniality/Modernity Group (Grosfoguel, 2007).

The Coloniality/Modernity group developed, alongside those whose worldviews had been devalued, a body of scholarship on decoloniality with a focus on other visions of the present and the future beyond the modern (Gómez, 2014). The decolonial research program, dating to the late 1990s and early 2000s, related the failure of development to Eurocentric thought, modernity, and colonial patterns of domination and othering. The authors of this new paradigm characterized modernity as a historical, social, cultural, and philosophical process: historical in that it began with the colonization of the Americas and proceeded through the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution; social in that it disembedded social life from its local context and increased space/time distancing; cultural in that it emphasized rationalization, universalization, and individuation, subalternizing non-European cultures and knowledge; and philosophical in that it placed man, as opposed to nature or the divine, at the center of knowledge (Escobar, 2013). Scholars stress that there is no modernity without coloniality and that Eurocentrism is the hegemonic, universalist knowledge form of both modernity and coloniality. The colonial difference, a privileged epistemological and political space entailing the subalternization of knowledge and cultures, allows the development apparatus to adopt a global hegemonic model of power for the benefit of white European peoples (Escobar, 2013). In aiming to counter Eurocentric knowledge production dynamics, decolonial scholars work collectively together with social movements, intellectual-activists, and universities.

Despite the differences between postcolonial and decolonial scholarship, it cannot be denied that they share several perspectives in their critique of development. Ignoring convergences and fixating on differences does not make it easier to investigate and address the complexities of social reality. Neither is it useful to consider these streams of thought as binaries, ignoring the facts that each has rich variants and that neither can be spoken of in the singular. Asher and Ramamurthy (2020: 5), speaking of postcolonial and decolonial feminisms, write that these are “the key to disrupting the unequal and hierarchical politics of knowledge-production. But for the key to work, we need to remind ourselves that these differences are also colonial constructs, and we must grapple with the double bind of undoing them.” In their recounting of the 2016 annual meeting of the National Women’s Studies Association, they describe how decolonial and postcolonial debates became bound by region. Although the panel members presented on themes that brought together postcolonial and decolonial perspectives both theoretically and practically, their South Asian bodies and names led to automatic assumptions regarding their intellectual formation and enactment of colonial epistemologies: their presentations “were read back as ‘South Asian,’ always already ‘postcolonial,’ and thus incapable of being decolonializing knowledge-practices” (2).

Asher and Ramamurthy (2020: 3–4) warn against several “simplistic (mis)readings of postcolonial and decolonial approaches” including (1) that the “post” in postcolonial refers to an “after” of colonialism that disregards present colonial power structures; (2) that postcolonial scholarship is spatially restricted to now-sovereign European imperial colonies; (3) that, consequently, ongoing fights for sovereignty and against racist capitalism are insufficiently acknowledged; (4) that decolonial scholars do not recognize that politics is messy in their overzealous attempts not only to interpret but to change the world; and (5) that they do not adequately contend with the issue of representation and the need for ethical navigation in speaking for the subaltern (Spivak, 1988). Through their narrative of the changes they have observed in more recent conferences and spaces of dialogue, they offer reason for hope that these moments will not forever be “territorialized, essentialized, and static.” Key contributions from postcolonial and decolonial scholarship have shaped an understanding of the way development colonizes the mind, creates difference, and considers women, nature, and non-Western knowledge as Other—contributions that have implications for the advancement of Latin American transition discourses and can inform North-South synergies for a civilizational transition.

Development, Otherness, and the Colonization of the Mind

With Truman’s speech in 1949, the category of “underdevelopment” was inaugurated, creating a fissure between the developed West and North and the underdeveloped South and East (Escobar, 1995; Esteva, 1992). Ivan Illich (1997: 101) describes how this category was converted into a mind-set that created a discursive trap for the subaltern, making it impossible for them to escape underdevelopment. He argues that the only way to escape this trap is to reject the demands that make accepted solutions necessary through the employment of a free mind: “Only free men can change their minds and be surprised; and while no men are completely free, some are freer than others.” Similarly, Fanon (1968) and Memmi (1967) write of the psychological effects of colonialism and call for a decolonization of the mind. Memmi exposes the depersonalizing and dehumanizing effects of colonialism, in which the colonized is tempted to accept being colonized for a time and the colonized society becomes trapped in “the passive sluggishness of its present” (1967: 145). Fanon discusses the deeper process of decolonization of the individual and the nation and stresses the importance for colonized societies of forging their own paths forward. In The Intimate Enemy (1989), Ashis Nandy describes colonialism as a psychological state with shared codes that alter original cultural priorities. He proposes that the culture of colonialism presumes a particular unconscious style of managing dissent in which the colonized identifies with the aggressor. This psychological control occurs with development as it does with colonialism. Development relies on the perpetual recognition and disavowal of difference (Bhabha, 1990). This process of othering can be seen in Europe’s patronizing representations of the Orient (Said, 1979), the colonizer’s social construction of race (Fanon, 1968), Christian missionaries’ dissemination of African stereotypes (Mudimbe, 1988), and Eurocentric literature and philosophy’s subalternization of non-European perspectives (Spivak, 1999). The difference or otherness created in development discourse, such as in the creation of the categories of developed and underdeveloped, operates through the same ambivalence that gives colonial stereotypes their currency.

The decolonial research program both drew on and distanced itself from the above-mentioned understanding of difference and the colonization of the mind. A central thesis of decoloniality is the understanding of Eurocentrism as a construct that originated with the colonization of the Americas through global capitalism and racialization (Quijano, 2000). Race (biology and culture) became the criterion for classifying the population through positions in the division of labor and ways of controlling the means of production. Quijano describes how British colonial America introduced the concept of whiteness, which later became “Europeanness.” Western Europe emerged as the center of the world. Quijano explains that the Marxist theory of the historical sequence of forms of work and the control of work cannot be applied to the history of the Americas. From the Eurocentric perspective, reciprocity, slavery, serfdom, and the independent production of commodities come before commodification of the labor force or capital. In the case of America, slavery was established to serve the needs of a capitalist world market, structurally articulated with one specific “race.” Quijano writes, “Capital existed long before America. But capitalism came into history, for the first time, with America” (219). The diverse ethnicities of indigenous and African peoples were homogenized into racial categories to be exploited by the colonial powers, and a new place was opened in the world imaginary for the idea of the future, along with a new perspective on space/time and on the place of humankind in that imaginary. This went hand in hand with a new Eurocentric knowledge paradigm born in the seventeenth century: modernity or rationality. Modernity changed the relations between “body” and “nonbody,” between Europe and non-Europe. All non-Europe became associated with the past, the primitive, the irrational and the traditional on an evolutionary path to being civilized, rationalized, and modern (Quijano, 2000).

Despite the differences in theoretical foundations and the point of departure for analyzing the West and modernity, postcolonial and decolonial paradigms concur in their critique of difference, otherness, and the colonization of the mind. These concepts have become important in recent contributions to transition discourses and North-South synergies and in efforts to transcend the habits of mind and tendencies toward othering that have become part of our global social fabric.

Development and the Subalternization of Women, Nature, and Non-Western Knowledge

Postcolonial scholars have deconstructed development as a form of colonialist and Western patriarchy that subalternizes women, nature, and non-Western forms of knowledge. The process of othering has many dimensions. Vandana Shiva (1989) describes how, from the Western patriarchal perspective, only work that produces profits and capital is productive. Development discourse is unable to cope with and grant validity to traditional knowledge and women’s diverse activities undertaken in terms of a logic of sustaining and protecting life and nature. Science, technology, politics, and the economy are inherently exploitative of both women and nature, and only an embrace of diversity and a holistic philosophy of being can allow moving beyond these destructive relationships.

Ester Boserup (1970) was the first woman to document the negative effects of development on women and their unrecognized role in economic production. Her study inaugurated an attempt to integrate women into development through strategies such as the UN’s Women in Development program. The use by such programs of language that carries meaning only for “insiders” creates distance between specialists and the objects of development (Saunders, 2002). Efforts such as the Women in Development program, with their faulty assumptions that economic growth is synonymous with development and improved standards of living for all and that all women want to be (and have the time to be) part of the international economy, only deepen the othering of women (Simmons, 1997). An example of this is Maria Mies’s (1980) finding that in Narsapur the participation of poor Indian housewives in a lace export business involved exploitative working conditions, lack of mobility, and dependence on men. Further criticism of the UN program and other attempts to incorporate women into development underscores the incompatibility of the aims of women’s movements with economic growth. Pam Simmons (1997) writes that the expansion of capitalism instigated by development is linked with further entrenchment of patriarchy and therefore incapable of fostering women’s equality with men.

Mohanty (1991) illustrates how even those who denounce patriarchy are engaged in subalternizing Third World women and representing them as the Other. Mohanty describes Western feminist work as ethnocentric and privileged and oblivious to its effect on the Third World. By using concepts such as reproduction, the sexual division of labor, the family, marriage, household, and patriarchy without cultural or historical context and considering them proof of the oppression of women, Western feminists are using “the prose of counter-insurgency” (Guha, 1988) to validate their feminist agendas (Mohanty, 1991). This tendency comes from a subconscious desire to colonize the subaltern woman; according to Lazreg (2002: 123), “Accounting for these women’s forms of life and liberating them (from themselves, their men, their cultures, their former colonisers) to be more or less like ‘us’ has always been the dream of feminists in their symbolic conquest of the world of Otherness.”

The subalternization of women and the underdeveloped in development discourse is intimately linked with that of nature. It was not until the 1970s, when global climate change was well under way, that nature and the environment began to be addressed in mainstream development. In 1972, a group of researchers commissioned by the Club of Rome completed a study using computer modeling to predict the interaction of the Earth’s finite resources and projected demographic and economic growth dynamics. The report, The Limits to Growth, was published, and later that year the United Nations held its first Conference on the Environment and Development. The conference led to the founding of the UN Environmental Program (UNEP). Later, in 1987, the UN World Commission on Development and the Environment report Our Common Future, also known as the Brundtland report, coined the term “sustainable development,” which was then launched at the Rio Summit on Environment and Development in 1992 (Demaria and Kothari, 2017). Under the sustainable-development discourse, economic growth was reframed as a necessary step toward the resolution of the ecological crisis.

In 2012, at the UN Conference for Sustainable Development, the UNEP went a step farther with the term “green economy,” aimed at “[enabling] economic growth and investment while increasing environmental quality and social inclusiveness” (Demaria and Kothari, 2017: 2591). The green-economy and sustainable-development discourses overlook the historical and structural roots of poverty and inequality and the biophysical limits to growth and overemphasize modern science and technology. Additionally, they are not concerned with the consumerism that led to unsustainable patterns in the first place. Shiva (2001) describes a worldwide environmental apartheid in which two-thirds of the world’s population, inhabitants of the Global South, rely heavily on natural resources for their livelihoods. The destruction of the Earth’s natural resources through development and unbridled capitalism has a disproportionate effect on the world’s poor, who transfer their resources to the rich in the name of international competition while pollution and contamination are transferred from the rich to the poor.

Finally, development’s overreliance on modern Western science has led to an othering of local traditional and collective knowledge bases. Shiva (1989: 19–20) writes that modern science is a project of Western patriarchy in both its history and its ideology. She explains that two competing trends emerged in modern science: the Paracelsians, ² who “did not dichotomise between mind and matter, male and female,” and the Baconians, ³ who “created dichotomies between culture and nature, mind and matter, male and female.” With the triumph of the Baconian program and the scientific revolution, it became culturally appropriate to disregard ethical considerations in the name of objectivity and neutrality. The reductionist worldview promoted by modern science has developed the perception of reality as a machine rather than as a living organism, sanctioning the domination of nature and women and legitimizing experts and specialists as the only justified and legitimate knowledge seekers. It rejects organic systems of knowledge as irrational and assigns itself “a new sacredness that forbids any questioning of the claims of science” (26). This knowledge system is well suited to market profit but not to genuine knowledge generation. Its reductionism results in violence against women and nature. Whereas Western modern science rejects the feminine principle, pluralistic ethno-science unites belief-action with theory-practice, nurturing the agency of women and non-Western cultures in establishing a “democracy of all life” (37).

Latin America has a rich history of local knowledge generation. The contributions of indigenous and Afro-descendant knowledge systems and worldviews, popular education, and participatory action research have laid a foundation for emancipatory thought across the continent. Santos’s (2015) work on “epistemologies of the South” is notable for its emphasis on a dialogue of different ways of knowing. He argues that the proliferation of Western epistemologies constitutes “cognitive injustice.” This injustice has devalued the ways of knowing and meaning making of people across the globe and constitutes an existential crisis that affects not only the South but also the North and the West.

Decoloniality and Civilizational Crisis

Through an examination of the pathologies of development, modernity, coloniality, and the present world order, decolonial scholars have increasingly referred to, more than a failure of development, a “crisis of civilization” (Fuente Carrasco, 2012; Ornelas et al., 2013; Sosa Fuentes, 2012). It is perhaps because of this understanding of the scale of the pathology, and of the civilizational transformation that is required, that postdevelopment discourse has begun to speak of civilizational transition, North-South synergies, and the need to draw on the transformational potential of religion and spirituality (Beling and Vanhulst, 2019). Postcolonial scholars were pioneers in articulating the pathology of modern civilization. Decolonial theory took a decidedly antimodern stance. Transition discourses recognize that civilizational transition must draw on a careful selection of elements from both old and new paradigms.

The concept of civilizational transition must not be confused with the teleological interpretation of history promoted by both capitalist and socialist schools of thought. Whereas both capitalism and socialism promote a materialistic interpretation of human progress, Latin American indigenous cosmologies offer a more complex and holistic vision of time, history, and renewal. Silvia Rivera-Cusicanqui (2012: 96) describes the Aymara concept of Pachakuti, a cyclical view of history that blurs the lines between the past, present, and future:

The indigenous world does not conceive of history as linear; the past-future is contained in the present. The regression or progression, the repetition or overcoming of the past is at play in each conjuncture and is dependent more on our acts than on our words. . . The contemporary experience commits us to the present—aka pacha—which in turn contains within it the seeds of the future that emerge from the depths of the past [qhip nayr uñtasis sarnaqapxañani]. The present is the setting for simultaneously modernizing and archaic impulses, strategies to preserve the status quo and others that signify revolt and renewal of the world: Pachakuti.

The understanding of nonlinearity and of progression through simultaneous preservation, rejection, and renewal has significant implications for individuals, communities, cultures and societies in civilizational transition. Instead of a blind imitation of past traditions or the modern way of life, elements of culture, systems of thought, ecology and the economy must all be reconsidered. Pachakuti requires identifying within the contemporary experience those elements that are to be preserved, those that are to be rejected, and those that require renewal. Sosa Fuentes (2012) refers to the importance of creating new paradigms capable of resolving the concrete problems of Latin American social reality. He clarifies that this does not mean imposing an “antiscience” fundamentalism; rather, it means counterhegemonic use of the accumulated knowledge of humanity in which scientific knowledge can enter into dialogue with religion, popular knowledge, and all such excluded paradigms of thought.

Sosa Fuentes (2012) writes that the crisis of civilization is an agony brought about by a linear interpretation of history and a culture that considers itself universal. He quotes Morín (1998: 39) on the globalization of neoliberal ideology: “The world is experiencing agonizing pain caused by what is not known to be birth or death. It is a complex, contradictory, agonizing situation.” Rather than characterizing the civilizational crisis as birth or death, Arbab and Duhart (2017) liken it to adolescence, a long and painful period of tumult between humanity’s childhood and its maturity. They portray that, if modernity is a product of adolescence, we need to identify those elements of modern thought and action that are expressions of rebellion against childish fantasies, those that are a continuation of the illusions of childhood, and those that are perceptions of the exigencies of an age of maturity. Thus, instead of replacing modernity with a new hegemonic ideology, both Pachakuti and the modernity/adolescence analogy recognize that certain social, cultural, political, and economic elements will be preserved while some will require rebellion and others renewal.

Latin American Transition Discourses

An understanding of the complexities of civilizational transition has informed Latin American transition discourses such as buen vivir and post- extractivism. They recognize that neither a romanticized return to the past nor an embrace of development and modernity can address the pathology of civilizational crisis. Buen vivir (sumak kawsay in Quechua and suma qamaña in Aymara) has emerged as a plural concept including the idea that well-being is possible only when we know how to live together (Albó, 2009). Rooted in Andean indigenous traditions, instead of a mystical return to a static indigenous path it “is a harmonious balance between material and spiritual components, which is only possible in the specific context of a community, which is social but also ecological” (Gudynas, 2011: 444). It does not attempt to propose a universal solution for all regions but calls for each culture to explore and build its own buen vivir.

Although the original concepts of buen vivir had been articulated by indigenous intellectuals in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Mexico since the 1990s, they first entered the Western academic discourse as an alternative to development through the texts of Sarayaku anthropologist Carlos Viteri (Torres-Solis and Ramírez-Valverde, 2019). His texts (Viteri, 2002; 2003) focused on the experience of sumak kawsay in opposition to Western conceptions of development in Ecuador’s Pastaza Province. In 2008, Ecuador and Bolivia incorporated sumak kawsay and suma qamaña into their countries’ constitutions, converting buen vivir into a practical aspiration for other Latin American peoples (Hidalgo-Capitán and Cubillo-Guevara, 2014). Although the constitutions have lofty goals, the countries have remained tied to extractivism and neodevelopmentalism, strengthening a tripod of exports, investment, and consumerism. Other Latin American “progressives” have confronted the same pitfalls of materialism (Gudynas, 2016). Indigenous thinkers across the continent have offered a critical view of the appropriation of buen vivir by state and academic actors. For the Brazilian indigenous activist Ailton Krenak (2020), buen vivir is effective only through an abandonment of anthropocentrism. According to Krenak, instead of operating as consumers of the natural world it is essential to operate as beings that are part of the self-regenerating biosphere, thinking together with the Earth in what he calls a “cosmic dance” (15). For the Maya-Xinca activist Lorena Cabnal (2012: 3), ancestral practices of the Earth have not always been applied to gender relations, and an “original ancestral patriarchy” must be confronted to fulfill the promise of a good life. For the Aymara sociologist Silvia Rivera-Cusicanqui (2015: 146), the state’s implementation of buen vivir has been hollow and merely ornamental, lacking any appreciation of the local dimensions of community, nature, and relationships with the sacred. This is something, she points out, that often occurs with highly abstract terms. Once buen vivir became detached from spatially and historically situated communities, it became an empty slogan used to justify extractive practices (148). The environmental crises wrought by modernity can only be confronted by interconnected communities in action. These communities, which seek to recover other knowledges, do not silence dissident voices, and work with both hands and minds, will ultimately redefine political action through the micropolitics of daily action (Rivera-Cusicanqui, 2018: 73).

Concepts such as buen vivir have also emerged in other parts of the Global South. For example, Ecological Swaraj or radical ecological democracy, a democratic grassroots discourse developed in India and focused on self-reliance and self-governance, aims to empower every person to be part of decision making and considers human well-being to have holistic (physical, material, sociocultural, intellectual, and spiritual) dimensions (Demaria and Kothari, 2017). The approach relies on “ecological wisdom and sustainability, social well-being and justice, economic democracy, direct political democracy, and cultural diversity,” and buen vivir “is an evolving approach, not a blueprint set in stone” (7).

Other Latin American transition discourses intimately related to buen vivir include postextractivism and the transition toward a fossil-fuel-free economy—proposals developed by social movements and scholars throughout the continent (Gudynas, 2015). The extraction of natural resources from countries of the Global South is fueling not only the type of dependency criticized by the center-periphery theories of the past century but serious financial and environmental challenges such as climate change on a global scale and local tensions and social conflict. In communities whose existence, livelihoods, health, and territories are threatened, civil society is increasingly calling for an end to “predatory extractivism” (Gudynas, 2013: 167). The Peruvian Network for Globalization with Equity launched a campaign in 2010 that presented politicians with a list of demands and proposals for transitions to postextractivism in sectors ranging from energy and mining to farming and fisheries (Gudynas, 2013). The campaign emphasized a need for transition scenarios, and in 2011 a platform was created to explore and develop alternatives to extractive development. In Argentina, Maristella Svampa, concurring with local social movements, denounced extractivist mega-mining policies and pointed to the success of popular referendums against the state’s neodevelopmentalist strategies (Svampa and Antonelli, 2009; Svampa and Alvarez, 2010). Popular referendums have been on the rise in other countries in South America as well. Walter and Urkidi (2017) identified 68 metal-mining consultations in which communities in Peru, Argentina, Ecuador, Colombia, and Guatemala voiced their discontent with extractivist development projects.

Regardless of their presence in national policies, transition discourses have served as platforms for the articulation of diverse social movements that reject extractive models of development. In black communities on the Pacific coast, women have mobilized to demand their community’s right to territory and life free from the environmentally and socially degrading practices of gold mining. Since the 1990s, alternative production projects in the southern Pacific region of Colombia had incorporated the concept of buen vivir and were pioneers of the concept in Colombia (Mina Rojas et al., 2015). More recently, black women’s movements have expanded the notion of buen vivir with the contributions of decolonial popular feminisms (Conway and Lebon, 2021). The women of the Yolombó community in Cauca had not been informed of plans for gold extraction when foreign companies first arrived on the banks of the Ovejas River. The river was their only source of drinking water and the center of their cultural identity, and they had recently defended it from having its course altered by a dam. When in 2014 foreign workers sexually assaulted a young girl from the community of La Toma, this and the arrival of mining machinery led them to mobilize and call on other communities for support (Mina Rojas et al., 2015). Calling for respect for bodies and territories, they marched in the capital under the slogan “Territory is life, and life is not sold, it is loved and defended” (Mina Rojas et al., 2015: 173). They continue to defend life, territory, and water, describing their resistance as based on ubuntu, a plural philosophy adopted by the Afrodiasporic Collective of Colombia and interpreted as “I am because we are.”

In the coffee region of southeastern Antioquia, multinationals identified the Middle Cauca Belt bordering the Cauca River as a prime region for gold mining. In 2006 the area was included in the National Plan for Mining Development, opening about 80 percent of it to mining licenses (Roa Avendaño et al., 2016). In response to the increased presence of mining companies, peasant, indigenous, youth, and environmental organizations from across the region joined to form the Cinturón Occidental Ambiental (Western Environment Belt—COA). Claiming the region as “sacred territory for life,” the COA has organized gatherings and marches, as well as several democratic spaces for opposing extractive projects and proposing community life plans ⁴ (Roca-Servat and Palacio Ocando, 2019). A key component of its resistance includes nurturing a web of alternative economies focused on agroecological practices and food sovereignty. Peasant associations such as that of Caramanta, Pueblorrico, and Támesis have focused on solidarity economies and responsible consumption, and indigenous communities such as the Emberá-Chamí have developed artisanal forestry practices and the recovery of native seeds and crafts. Roca-Servat and Palacio Ocando (2019) analyze the discourses of the peasant and indigenous organizations of the COA, identifying common threads of decolonial thought, and reflect on their involvement in the collective processes of resistance.

The Pursuit of North-South Synergies

Arturo Escobar (2011) has drawn attention to transition discourses as alternatives to the sustainable-development movement and paths to the pluriverse. ⁵ He argues that any attempt to achieve sustainability under the current economic system is only a reduction of unsustainability. Transition discourses are promising because “they posit radical cultural and institutional transformations—indeed, a transition to an altogether different world” (138). He identifies the following characteristics of transition discourses: they aim to move to post-fossil-fuel economies, emphasize strategies of relocalization, including decentralized and democratic food and energy systems, and promote place-based (but not place-bound) knowledge and societies that nurture local economies, ecological integrity, and spirituality. In essence, the point of departure for transition discourses is the community and the communal “as a foundational principle for the new societies” (Escobar, 2015: 459). This implies a need to break away from the “One-World world” of Western dualist ontologies that is the ideological legacy of colonialism, development, and globalization. Escobar describes transition discourses as pluriversal proposals based on a set of principles for personal and collective action rather than concrete political agendas. These principles, such as relocalization, recommunalization of social life, and the strengthening of direct democracy and local autonomies, are materialized in diverse ways in different places. Pluriversal politics are not formulaic but relational (Escobar, 2020). This is perhaps why the pluriverse has not developed into a political agenda but operates as a conceptual framework for many place-based modes of action.

The full range of transition discourses is too vast to explore in this space. Although the most prominent Northern transition discourse is arguably degrowth, many other discourses and initiatives have evolved. For example, the Great Transition Initiative posits that humanity is entering the stage of planetary civilization and that the transition will require a transformational worldview with fundamentally different sets of values and institutional arrangements (Escobar, 2015). It emphasizes interconnectedness, rejection of consumption as the source of happiness, and communal and solidarity ethics as the basis for an alternative global vision, a “globalizing civilization” (Escobar, 2015). The Transition Town Initiative offers scenarios and strategies for towns to transition to a post-fossil-fuel society centered on community resilience, relocalization, and strength through diversity for greater food and energy sovereignty. Escobar (2018) also points to the UN Stakeholder Forum and interreligious dialogues as transition discourses of the Global North. Finally, degrowth, the proposal that primarily rejects economic growth as an objective for social progress, envisions the “equitable downscaling of production” to live within the Earth’s limits, along with new ways of organizing and living life informed by simplicity, conviviality, care, and the commons (D’Alisa, Demaria, and Kallis, 2014). Proponents of degrowth emphasize that downscaling does not mean less of the same; rather, the emphasis is on transforming social relations, the nature of work, forms and uses of energy, and relations with the natural world.

Escobar has called for a bridging of the divide between transition discourses from the Global North and the Global South The literature that engages this proposal is limited and conflicted. Brand, Boos, and Brad (2017) highlight commonalities between approaches, and Beling et al. (2018: 305) write that the “weaknesses . . . of each discourse can be compensated through the strengths of the other ones.” Others, such as Altmann (2020: 94), however, call the academic proliferation of buen vivir “epistemic extractivism” whereby “knowledge from the Global South appears . . . as raw material that only the Global North can turn into sophisticated theories that later on are reimported to the Global South.” Bendix (2017: 2624) is similarly skeptical, stating that the German degrowth discourse (Postwachstum) perpetuates the “development gaze” by continuing to focus on growth and othering the Global South by portraying “close-to-nature peoples” as living within natural boundaries. He also warns against the potential for transition discourses, particularly from the North, to fall into the trap of universalism and teleological notions of progress (2017: 2625): “Postwachstum proposals . . . come across as new blueprints. For instance, Paech proposes a solution for growth-orientation in a universalist manner. . . . This is incongruent with the Post Development position of pluriversality . . . a world where many worlds fit.”

One important difference is that buen vivir seeks to distance itself from Eurocentric political thought, including socialism’s materialist perspective. As Gudynas (2011: 446) writes, buen vivir is “not only postcapitalist, but also postsocialist.” He clarifies that the basis of buen vivir includes a commitment to the spirituality of life, with the community including the whole environment. This is a concept delinked from any predetermined historical linearity, completely rejecting the aims of progress and growth: “It is not a Southern version of de-growth but, more strictly, actually an “a-growth” posture” (Gudynas, 2016: 728).

Regarding the current state of dialogue between transition discourses from the North and the South, Escobar (2018: 66) states:

Those engaged in transition activism and theorizing in the North rarely delve seriously into those being proposed in the South, and those in the South tend to dismiss too easily Northern proposals, or to consider them inapplicable to the South. There is little concerted effort to bringing these two sets of discourses and strategies into dialogue; this dialogue would be not only mutually enriching but perhaps essential for an effective politics of transformation.

These remarks recall the above-mentioned debates described by Asher and Ramamurthy (2020). Just as they express hope that the colonial constructs of difference will eventually be grappled with, Escobar envisions that “divisions between ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South,’ and hence between ‘degrowth’ and ‘postdevelopment,’ . . . will tend to dissolve” (Escobar, 2015: 460). His call for overcoming difference and moving toward a “politics of transformation” is not a recommendation that approaches be lumped together or inconsistencies be dismissed. Rather, a true civilizational transition will require increased dialogue across divides in which the elements to be preserved, rejected, and renewed can be identified in all paradigms of thought and action. Latin American scholars have begun this work. Duhart (2019) presents a comprehensive overview of Latin American transition discourses and an analysis of both limiting and enabling dimensions within each discourse. Decolonial scholars have brought religion and spirituality into the discussion on civilizational transition. Following Pope Francis’s second encyclical, Beling and Vanhulst (2019) published a collection exploring the role of religion and spirituality in societal transformation. In it Brand (2019) states that, given the transnational interdependence of the present economic system and political structures, the changes will be so complex that they will require an emancipatory project encompassing individual and collective actors beyond the left. Both Northern and Southern perspectives would benefit from a clearer conception of the role of institutional actors such as the state and organized religions in social emancipation.

In the true spirit of a dialogue of ways of knowing, the contributors to this collection engage with spiritual teachings, recognizing religion as a source and system of knowledge that has been disregarded by modern thinkers. Eschenhagen (2019), for example, offers a creative and thoughtful analysis of the convergences and divergences of the modern discourse on sustainability, the Aymara concept of suma qamaña, and Buddhism. She says that the purpose of exploring alternatives through such a dialogue is to “evaluate what to leave and what to reject” from both the Western and the non-Western worldviews she presents (Eschenhagen, 2019: 193, my translation). Similarly, Karlberg (2014: 10), in an essay written for the Great Transition Initiative, states that the “secularization thesis” of modern thinkers is being challenged, since religion remains a motivating impulse for the majority of the Earth’s population. Any attempt to work toward a systemic transition must recognize that “the most thoughtful approaches to science and the most thoughtful approaches to religion each have a role and . . . people who identify as secular and people who identify as religious can and must work shoulder to shoulder to achieve common ends.” Thus not only will a civilizational transition require dialogues between postcolonial and decolonial perspectives and between transition discourses of the North and the South. To shed light on the experiences and visions of historically excluded populations, these dialogues must also engage with religion and spirituality as systems of knowledge. In this transition, certain elements will be shed and others will be preserved. In Rivera-Cusicanqui’s (2012: 96) words, “The present is the setting for simultaneously modernizing and archaic impulses, of strategies to preserve the status quo and of others that signify revolt and renewal of the world: Pachakuti.”

Conclusion

The decolonial research program was initially inspired by the postcolonial paradigm but later distanced itself from it. Moving away from poststructuralism and postmodernism, it sought to establish itself in its own right, incorporating other knowledges and ways of knowing in an effort to move beyond Eurocentric habits of mind. Drawing on indigenous and Afro-descendant philosophies and in collaboration with civil society, social organizations, and activists, decolonial scholars have forged a unique corpus of thought contributing to the concept of transition discourse. Moving beyond difference and critique toward civilizational change and communal life on the planet, they have identified points of convergence between transition discourses of the North and the South. They have also begun to place transition discourses in conversation with religion and spirituality, recognizing their central role in civilizational processes and thus broadening the dialogue of ways of knowing. In moving forward, care must be taken not to perpetuate the dynamics that the decolonial program has sought to expose. There is still much to be learned regarding the cross-pollination of concepts and approaches to avoid what Rivera-Cusicanqui (2012: 104) calls “co-optation and mimesis” and the selection of ideas that nourish the trends of the moment:

Ideas run, like rivers, from the south to the north and are transformed into tributaries in major waves of thought. But just as in the global market for material goods, ideas leave the country converted into raw material, which become regurgitated and jumbled in the final product. Thus, a canon is formed for a new field of social scientific discourse, postcolonial thinking. This canon makes visible certain themes and sources but leaves others in the shadows.

It is inevitable that, in the process of cross-pollination and dialogue, things will get messy at times. Ideas are often “regurgitated and jumbled,” and they are also often selectively (mis)read. Both postcolonial and decolonial perspectives have demonstrated the ways in which development has perpetuated difference and othering and in which these dynamics continue to play out in every corner of the globe. Nevertheless, a fixation on difference and critique is no longer sufficient. Through a recognition of a civilizational crisis and the exigencies of an age of transition, scholars have begun to deepen their thought and praxis regarding a dialogue of ways of knowing. Thus, although the threat of co-optation and mimesis is real, through continued dialogue it may be possible to overcome it.

Contributions in this direction are relatively recent. The conceptualization of an age of transition can produce the strength and stamina to continue expanding knowledge paradigms. Considering the present civilizational crisis akin to adolescence, we can begin the arduous task of identifying elements of the past that are being rejected, those that are continuing the illusions and fantasies of humanity’s collective childhood, and those that reflect an understanding of the exigencies of an age of maturity (Arbab and Duhart, 2017). In bringing both postcolonial and decolonial perspectives and transition discourses from the North and the South into dialogue, the ideas and theories and habits of thought of adolescence may be examined and, eventually, transcended.