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Paper short abstract:

In an era of socio-ecological crisis, the authors - Joseph Edward Alegado and Justin Lau - argue that the cases, “global south rooted” does not necessarily advance de-colonialism if one fails to see how existing epistemological frameworks are, too, reproduced and embraced by local actors.

Paper long abstract:

Reflecting on this research on communities prefiguring solutions to the plastic pollution crisis, Alegado explores how solutions that are being proposed in the Global South often push narratives that perpetuate colonialism and do not address the root cause of the waste crisis. Alegado unpacks how voices of impacted communities are missing in these concepts. Reflecting on his research with local waste entrepreneurs and experts, Lau shows how these so-called ‘local’ actors, trained by international NGOs, often indirectly replicate and introduce ‘foreign’ environmental models to the community. Lau suggests the need for a new ‘studying-up’ approach in the Global South to understand how specific development knowledge is co-created and/or co-opted by intelligentsia, and who gets to define ‘epistemic justice’ and for whom.

Trained in the Euro-American intellectual milieu, we critically re-examine our positionality in relation to the existing Global North-based development paradigms (e.g. zero-waste and the circular economy) that have taken root in our respective field sites in Southeast Asia. In the process, we will engage in a dialogue to nuance the notion of colonialism. Alegado suggests that colonialism manifests as plastic pollution in the context of the Philippines, as pollution is often externalized from the Global North to Global South. At the moment, the more mainstream zero-waste framework does not take colonial history into account and may perpetuate colonialism. In contrast, Lau argues that while this may be the case, pollution is always multiple and understood differently. Its complexity cannot be reduced to colonialism writ large.