‘A Postcolonial Critique of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals: Decolonizing Emancipation and Human Empowerment’

Building on a postcolonial critique of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, this paper questions Welzer and Inglehart’s (2014) notion of emancipation through human empowerment. The paper intends to address the following research question: how can it be argued that the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGSs) promote a western conception of human empowerment based on the material accumulation of what Welzer and Inglehart’s (2014) classify as “action resources”? The paper questions the role of the countries of the global south in shaping global development policies. Established following a western and neoliberal perspective, which allocates to them a universal character, the Sustainable Development Goals do not consider the complexity of civic communities located in the global south reifying a form of “imperialism” that mirrors the goals of the colonial project (Cooper & Stoler, 1997, p.35; McMichael, 2017). The postcolonial analysis on the coloniality of power discusses how colonial relations transcend mere political domination incorporating an epistemic dimension and hegemony based on knowledge production that perpetuates global dependence and normalizes narratives which distort the realities and cultures of non-western peoples (Quijano, 1992). Employing interviews, discourse analysis, and document analysis as methodological options, this paper discusses the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals as examples of those narratives. The paper argues that the UN SDGs have adopted a western conceptualization of human empowerment which obliviates tensions around the domestic and global civic agency of subaltern peoples and neglect how “diasprocity” and “indigenity” may arise as elements of deterritorialization of epistemic perspectives on development and democracy.