Indigenous Cosmology in Global Contexts: A Remediation of the Paradigm of Sustainable Development in Natural Resource Extraction Policies

Abstract

The project of sustainable development has been a guiding principle in international economic and political relations for decades. Though promising progress and the eradication of poverty, while securing the environment, the development project has come at a significant price in terms of environmental degradation and the erosion of domestic norms and identities. Thus, there is a clear tension between the goals and outcomes of the historical trajectory of the development discourse which provides great insight into global North-South relations. The paper has two simultaneous aims of the paper. The first is to investigate the nature of the Western paradigm of sustainable development in natural resource extraction and interrogate its supposed commitment to fostering economic growth while simultaneously supporting environmental sustainability. The application of a Foucaultian lens, with the incorporation of key concepts such as governmentality and regimes of truth, functions to recover subject positions of the discourse. First, the Northern position of power and truth dissemination and second, the Southern actors whose beliefs disappear through the identity ascription inherent to the Western notion of sustainable development. Finding the cosmopolitan foundations of sustainable development to be fictitious, the paper then develops to the second aim of the paper: the possibility of alternative frameworks of natural resource extraction, finding value within the institutionalization of indigenous cosmologies and traditional knowledges in development governance at the local and global level.