Decolonising resilience: the urgent need to think beyond ‘inclusion’
Local communities are routinely consulted in resilience projects, but their knowledge is undermined by development actors’ neocolonial perceptions and assumption that they know better. To counter this, local communities and Indigenous peoples must be seen as agents, rather than as passive subjects of Eurocentric resilience policies.

A dam rehabilitated by UNDP as part of their project on building resilience in Northern Ghana
In our contemporary world of neocolonial heritage and Western patterns of governance, what would it really mean to “decolonise” resilience in development interventions? At a recent research workshop at the University of Ghana, I joined a team of established scholars and development practitioners to explore how resilience represents a form of neocoloniality and modernist climate governance systems, and to reconsider new approaches to resilience building rather than simplistically including local communities in policymaking.
Drawing on the workshop and excerpts from my PhD fieldwork, I argued in a recent article that there is a need to understand historical power legacies, and affirm local and Indigenous people’s cultures and knowledge in key resilience policy decisions. Yet these communities are barely recognised in resilience policymaking processes, and interventions focus almost exclusively on Eurocentric modes of knowledge production. Resilience policy is shaped by – and shapes – the ongoing effects of colonisation.
Polarised views of resilience
The workshop, Decolonising Resilience, was part of a research project aiming to establish a Global South-based network of resilience scholars. It brought together academics from the UK, South Sudan, Rwanda and Ghana, and representatives from Germany’s development agency, GIZ, to discuss the colonial legacies in current resilience policies and how to address them. Participants had divergent views on the meaning of “resilience”. On the one hand, some participants saw it as a critical adaptation strategy necessary for people to “bounce back” after climate or environmental shocks, even enabling them to enhance their livelihoods in the process. Through this lens, resilience affords people an opportunity to positively exploit valuable opportunities, rather than remaining static and suffering the consequences of shocks.
However, others criticised resilience approaches for failing to attempt to control risks and for abandoning prospects of hope, security and progress. They viewed resilience policies as focused on procedures of (re)capacitating people and systems to cope with, adapt to and shape changes. In this light, the World Bank’s definition of resilience as “helping people to help themselves” denotes a neoliberal and somewhat neocolonial shift in responsibility from the state and international policymakers to local and Indigenous populations to better strive for themselves.
Neocolonial subjectivity in resilience policy processes
Based on extensive fieldwork since 2022, my research has investigated the rationales and systemic procedures that shape resilience projects in vulnerable communities in Northern Ghana. Through ethnography and semi-structured interviews with farmers and development agents, I examined the knowledge and power that influence resilience initiatives, especially the UN Development Programme (UNDP) project, Increased Resilience to Climate Change in Northern Ghana (2016-2022). The research showed that development agents deploy factors including vulnerability, low adaptive capacities, food insecurity and water scarcity in local and Indigenous communities to rationalise resilience planning. Their neocolonial biases challenge any policy objectives towards building resilience for a sustainable future. This approach often obscures the agency, capabilities and environmental management approaches of local and Indigenous people themselves.
In Ghana, for example, elites and scientists are often perceived as power-holders with technical knowledge to devise adaptation and agricultural policies. Policymakers in the UNDP’s project stressed its community-led nature, driven by the need to address climate change from the perspectives of farmers themselves. From 2011, project staff carried out “vulnerability assessments” and “baseline studies” to assess vulnerabilities, existing conditions and socioeconomic challenges. This included stakeholder consultations with farmers, traditional leaders, local officials and NGOs, to identify priorities and ensure the project was “community-centric”.
Yet farmers felt the project’s decision-making, inclusion structures and implementation recycled old frames of reference. They were sceptical about the consultation, emphasising that the intervention was designed and implemented by “experts”, and they were only presented with the project plan at the so-called stakeholder consultation meeting. They felt their knowledge was severely marginalised and underutilised, largely because of a lack of equal representation in stakeholder meetings and project design.
Coloniality of power, knowledge and being
While decolonial thinkers often see the exclusion of local communities or Indigenous peoples in development policy as suggestive of “killing and displacement of other knowledges”, some argue for the need to critique Western coloniality of power and being in climate change policy.
My research hinges on the “coloniality of power”, an ongoing form of power asymmetry co-existing between policymakers and local Indigenous populations in resilience discourse. This asymmetry justifies why projects are delivered irrespective of how poorly they are designed. Such top-down planning often engenders resistance and project failure, because local people are left outside the discourse of power. No matter how much communities are “included” in decision-making, neocolonial power imbalances avert policy objectives aimed at building resilience for a sustainable future. Power asymmetries and historical manifestations exclude local people from development discourse.
Questions of power in resilience policy governance portray “coloniality of knowledge” which involves critical questions such as who generates which knowledge, and why? My research reveals how scientific knowledge is privileged over local knowledge in project implementation. Interviews with policymakers revealed how they identified and utilised a particular kind of knowledge, creating a universal “truth regime” by elevating their knowledge as the objective truth. Here, local voices and forms of truth are marginalised because they exist outside Western modernity. My research also illuminates the “coloniality of being”, in which elites assume one-size-fits-all solutions, applicable across cultures, without questioning difference, context and relations. Together with the coloniality of power and knowledge, this undermines resilience policy in the Global South.
Thinking beyond ‘inclusion’: decolonising participatory spaces
In arguing for climate justice and resilience, most scholars advocate for community participation and inclusion to address social inequalities. Yet induced participatory spaces further undermine local communities’ knowledge and entrench authoritative power. Even in spaces where communities are included in participatory spaces, they are seen as “minority interests” with little power. At the workshop in Ghana, calls to “move beyond inclusion” were profound, with participants arguing for reconstruction of the top-down resilience planning that produces and entrenches power imbalances and prioritises Western knowledge. This would ensure decolonisation is not reduced to inclusion or participation, but extends into peripheral systems and instructs how resilience policy can be meaningfully improved.
In my research, policymakers seem to consult farmers and beneficiary communities in resilience planning to tick a political checklist and satisfy donor requirements. Although local communities are included in participatory spaces, their knowledge is undermined by othering processes that portray communities as “victims” and “uneducated”, and elites who assume they know better than Indigenous peoples.
Decolonising resilience entails seeing local communities and Indigenous peoples as agents, rather than as passive subjects and objects of Eurocentric resilience policies. This is essential to deconstruct neoliberal policies that subjugate Indigenous peoples to Western interventions, regardless of their culture and lived realities. It involves recognising “difference” and a pluriversality of cultures, rather than the homogenisation seen in many development projects in the Global South.
Instead of decolonising methodologies that often neglect differences within Indigenous and local communities, intersectional approaches are needed, to explore gender, class, race, power structures and relations within local and Indigenous communities. Such approaches can prevent the entrenchment of asymmetrical power relations and ensure that even the most marginal groups within Indigenous communities benefit from resilience programming.
Further information
Clement Amponsah (2024) NeoColonial Subjectivities in Resilience Praxis and the Urgency to Think ‘Beyond Inclusion’, E-International Relations