Paper short abstract:

Practical experiences of decoloniality are already populating the sector, and they have an impact. This paper will present the experience of "Living decoloniality" a toolkit for practitioners and policy actors that gathered experiences of decoloniality happening in many different parts of the world.

Paper long abstract:

“Living decoloniality” is a toolkit in form of podcast, launched in 2023 for the benefit of policy actors and aid practitioners. Based on the assumption that the sector is steeped in coloniality and epistemic injustice, the toolkit collects practical experiences of decolonial re-existence through semi structured interviews to practitioners and researchers all over the world.

The first season introduced the concept of Coloniality and Colonial Matrix of Power (Quijano 2000), while the second focused on Coloniality of Being (Maldonaldo Torres 2007), and Coloniality of Gender (Lugones 2008). Snowball sampling was used to identify participants.

The toolkit also challenges methodologies as “scaling up” and “replication” when applied to aid, as inevitably focused on increasing numbers and maximizing resources in a logic of market economy, and therefore often leaving behind the most vulnerable and isolated subjects. It proposes therefore a different methodology for fruition and use, based on Extrapolation, as framed by Eugene Bardach (2007).

Finally, the podcast format was also chosen because of its potential: while only few practitioners would have accessed the toolkit had it been written as a report, many approached the podcast: it was downloaded about 2000 times in 6 months.

This paper is willing to present Living Decoloniality as a practical success, to share its methodological foundations and main findings after two seasons of broadcasting.