Resilience Praxis as a Function of Coloniality: Rethinking Modernity, Resistance, and Participation in Adaptation Governance

Journal article

As the world continues to grapple with severe climate change impacts over the past decade, states and international organisations are committing to ambitious policies/projects to build “resilience” while scaling up development efforts. At a critical juncture where questions of political power and knowledge production become salient, this paper examines why certain well‐intentioned resilience interventions fail and (re)produce unintended consequences. Drawing from ethnography in Bongo in the Upper East Region of Northern Ghana, I argue that despite neoliberal framings of “bottom‐up” participation, resilience praxis appropriates neo‐colonial subjectivities and power inequivalence that engender counter‐modernist spaces for onto‐epistemic struggles, community resistance, and development failure. Beyond including farmers in decision‐making in a tokenistic manner, I call for decolonial consciousness to critique historicities of power and recognise non‐modern ideologies: as an alternative ontology to deconstruct coloniality in critical adaptation governance. I conclude that resilience praxis must move beyond tokenistic participation and embrace a plurality/pluriversality of worlds to co‐produce contextually grounded and “just” climate solutions in the Anthropocene.

Authors: Amponsah, C

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Wiley
• Journal: Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography
• Publication date: 2025-06-08
• DOI: 10.1111/anti.70035
• EISSN: 1467-8330
• ISSN: 0066-4812
• Language: English
• Keywords: resilience; Northern Ghana; resistance; (de)coloniality; participation; modernity