Decolonising Regional Perspectives for Implementing the UN Sustainable Development Goals

Abstract

Contemporary experiences of colonialism include:

• The erasure of community culture integrity

• Global corporate power structures and systems (particularly the carbon industries)

• Regional exclusion and isolation (particularly between the Global North and South)

• Disciplinary dogma in university learning, teaching and research, globally

• The nexus of climate, species and cultural crises

The colonial paradigm is possibly the key factor for the nexus of climate, species and cultural crises, existing in the first place, and it continues to hinder UN SDG implementation. Regionalising these issues trivialises the inherent complexities of historic power structures that have crippled humanity’s ways of thinking and acting. However, regionalising the issues may, also, highlight the disparities of power and the consequences of the nexus of crises, thereby emphasising the need for ‘global citizens, otherwise’. As previously accepted and relatively stable (for some) regional structures fragment and morph into new alliances and patterns of human migration, the very concept of regionality may represent an absurdist tragedy that renders the SDGs obsolete. The process of decolonising university systems of education may offer novel, transdisciplinary ecological patterns of thinking and doing to emerge, beyond the confines of the SDGs and regions.