The United Nations proclaimed the years between 2014 and 2024 to be the Decade of Sustainable Energy for All, and the SDG 7 emphasizes the necessity of universal energy access. Development policies increasingly see decentralised supply structures as a viable solution to achieve that goal. From a postcolonial perspective however, it is also relevant whether renewable decentralized en- ergies enable more local control and reduce dependency relations. Technology critics in the ‘70s and ‘80s saw this potential. In the ...

This article discusses the protest movement against the neoliberal capitalist world order which emerged in the second half of the 1990s and was inspired by the Mexican Zapatistas. This movement was considerably globalised and, despite different currents, characterised by a pluralist and anarchist conceptualization of politics. The article argues that it partly succeeded in preventing further liberalisation of world trade and, above all, that it provoked numerous reforms in the global political economy institutions ...

The Post-Development critique of ‘development’ has been around for more than 30 years now. While it is far from a homogenous school of thought, let alone practice, critical interventions of Post-Development proponents have been widely acknowledged and have punctuated mainstream debates. What is missing, however, is some closer engagement with how ideas and propositions can be translated to practice, and even more specifically, if and how they are reconcilable with logics, structures and institutions of states. In ...

Property relations have long been at the centre of social justice considerations and efforts for socio-economic change. Since the 1990s ethnic minorities who often happen to live in particularly biodiverse regions of the planet have started to challenge these often exploitative relations by claiming formal property rights based on territorially defined cultural identities. Originally celebrated by various critical schools of thought as a turning point in global neoliberal hegemony and a promising manifestation of ...

DPS Activist Special I ssue is published alongside the standard academic issue to provide a perspective from an activist positionality on postcolonial and development issues.

The paper seeks to define and situate postdevelopment (PD) theory within the social sciences by discussing its relation to other theoretical approaches. It concludes that PD can be seen to a rather limited extent as a development theory, but rather as a sociology of knowledge of this discipline and a critiqu e of its foundation. PD shares the critique of capitalism with Marxism but also has a more negative view of industrial modernity, its relation to nature, economic growth and productivity. For some, PD is characterized ...