colonialism

Participation of Indigenous peoples and local communities is encouraged in calls for sustainable transitions and transformations. The term ‘community’ is widely used yet nebulously defined. Conservation that removes people from their communities of land invokes epistemological authority and displaced relationships. We relate our work to the articles in this special issue to rethink the relationship between humans and nature in conservation. We propose expanding the term ‘local communities’ to include more than just humans.

We re-visit our chapter, "Economy as Ecological Livelihood" ten years later to unpack many of the ways it has reproduced colonialism in its framing and articulation. Seeking to take responsibility for our mistakes, we hope this self-critique can be generative of further work to better align community economies and livelihoods thinking with anti-colonial and decolonial priorities and movements.