The Challenges of Interrupting Climate Colonialism in Higher Education: Reflections on a University Climate Emergency Plan

Abstract

In this article Sharon Stein and Jan Hare ask how higher education institutions might begin to confront the connections between climate change and colonization. To grapple with this question, they examine the dynamics through which climate action can reproduce colonial relations and reflect on the challenges, complexities, and possibilities that emerged in the context of one university’s Indigenous engagement efforts around a climate emergency declaration. The authors suggest that if universities seek to interrupt climate colonialism, they will need to commit to upholding Indigenous rights, knowledges, and self-determination and to accepting responsibility for repairing colonial harm and developing respectful, reciprocal relationships with Indigenous communities and lands. To fulfill these commitments, universities will need to avoid the common tendency to seek quick solutions and instead support the development of institutional conditions and individual capacities that would make it possible to have difficult conversations about the historical and ongoing ways that they have been complicit in social and ecological harm.