As the climate and ecological crises intensify, governments and corporations increasingly use discourses of environmentalism and climate resilience to legitimize policies and practices that displace communities, especially those historically marginalized. Under the banner of sustainability, we see the reproduction of colonial power structures that, through smoke and mirrors enable dynamics of dispossession and land grabbing, deepening social and ecological injustices. These dynamics reflect a form of green colonialism, enforced through authoritarian means in which environmental governance becomes technocratic, centralized, and often militarized and genocidal, violating the rights of local and Indigenous populations. Authoritarian “environmentalism”, in this context, serves to concentrate power in elite hands, using climate imperatives to justify surveillance, forced evictions, and the criminalization of dissent. Meanwhile, communities that resist are increasingly subject to repression and elimination. This session brings together researchers working alongside affected communities to unpack how "green" agendas are being used as tools of dispossession, capitalist accumulation, and colonial expansion and erasure. It aims to foster critical dialogue and reflect on alternative approaches grounded in justice, autonomy, and decolonial environmental governance.
Invited speakers:
Hamza Hamouchene is a London-based Algerian researcher and activist. He is the North Africa Programme Coordinator at the Transnational Institute (TNI), and a founding member of Algeria Solidarity Campaign (ASC), Environmental Justice North Africa (EJNA) and the North African Food Sovereignty Network (NAFSN). He has worked on issues of extractivism, resources, land and food sovereignty as well as climate, environmental, and trade justice. He is the author/editor of: "Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate Justice in the Arab Region" (2023)
Mary Ann Manahan is a Filipina feminist activist researcher and doctoral assistant with the Conflict Research Group (CRG) of the Department of Conflict and Development Studies in Ghent University. Prior to her academic post, she worked with an activist NGO and various social movements advocating for redistribution, environmental, gender and social justice, and alternative development for 18 years. Her academic research interests encompass a broad range of topics in land and forest politics, socio-ecological dynamics, social movement activism, and beyond development. She aspires for radical collective actions that dismantle systems and structures of oppression and facilitate lasting systemic transformations. She has a co-author/editor of “The Geopolitics of Green Colonialism. Global Justice and Ecosocial Transitions” (2024).
Host
Maria Cordero Fernandez is a doctoral fellow at the Institute of Development Policy (IOB) at the University of Antwerp. Her PhD explores how processes of co-optation and depoliticization, rooted in capitalist and Western epistemic structures, challenge agroecology’s transformative potential. Through a relational comparison, her study examines grassroots mechanisms of epistemic resistance among agroecological peasants in Flanders and Indigenous communities in the Peruvian Andes, using potatoes as a bridging crop. Ultimately, her research seeks to contribute to policies and practices that strengthen the autonomy and knowledge systems of communities defending agroecology and territorial sovereignty.