Decolonizing International Development
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Decolonizing International Development
Decolonizing international development is an effort to confront the colonial histories, racial hierarchies, economic relationships, and knowledge systems that continue to influence development institutions. It questions why governments, donors, universities, international nongovernmental organizations, foundations, and experts based in wealthy countries retain disproportionate control over development priorities, funding, research, and evaluation.
The debate extends beyond adding more local employees or consulting communities after programs have already been designed. Decolonial approaches seek to transfer authority over resources, institutions, knowledge, and public narratives to the people most directly affected by development policies. They also challenge the assumption that Western economic growth, modernization, governance, and scientific knowledge provide universal models that every society should follow.
Colonial Foundations of Development
Modern international development emerged within a world shaped by European colonialism. Colonial governments extracted land, labor, natural resources, taxes, and knowledge while presenting their rule as a civilizing or modernizing project. After formal decolonization, many of these relationships continued through international financial institutions, foreign aid programs, trade systems, development agencies, universities, corporations, and nongovernmental organizations.
Critics argue that development can reproduce colonialism when outside institutions define what progress means, diagnose the problems of other societies, and control the resources intended to solve them. Development programs may privilege economic growth, market liberalization, industrialization, and Western administrative systems while dismissing local political traditions, subsistence economies, Indigenous knowledge, and community-defined priorities.
Post-development and pluriversal perspectives reject the idea that every society must advance along a single path toward a Western model of modernity. They emphasize diverse ways of organizing economies, governing communities, caring for the environment, and defining well-being. These alternatives include Indigenous sovereignty, ecological stewardship, solidarity economies, degrowth, buen vivir, Ubuntu, swaraj, mutual aid, and other community-rooted approaches.
Decolonization therefore involves both historical recognition and material change. Acknowledging colonial injustice is insufficient when wealth, decision-making authority, research funding, and institutional power remain concentrated in former colonial states and dominant international organizations.
Humanitarian Aid, Localisation and Power
Humanitarian and development organizations increasingly support localisation, meaning greater participation and leadership by national and community-based organizations. Local groups often possess stronger cultural knowledge, language skills, social relationships, and access to communities than international organizations. They may also remain present long after foreign agencies leave.
However, localisation does not automatically decolonize aid. International organizations may transfer responsibility for delivering programs while retaining control over funding, strategy, risk management, communications, and evaluation. Local organizations can consequently carry much of the workload and security risk while receiving only a small share of available resources.
Decolonial reform requires direct, flexible, and long-term funding for local and national organizations. It also requires transferring authority over program design, staffing, procurement, partnerships, public communications, and definitions of success. Local actors should not be treated merely as contractors responsible for implementing plans developed elsewhere.
Humanitarian institutions must also confront racism and unequal employment practices. International employees frequently receive higher salaries, better benefits, greater security protections, and more influence than national employees performing comparable work. Expertise associated with foreign universities or international organizations may be valued more highly than knowledge derived from lived experience.
Community-led responses in places such as Sudan, Myanmar, Ukraine, and refugee settlements demonstrate that local mutual-aid networks can respond effectively when international organizations cannot reach affected populations. These examples challenge assumptions that humanitarian action must be directed by large foreign agencies.
Locally Led Development, Funding and Philanthropy
Locally led development places communities, civil-society organizations, and public institutions in control of development priorities. Outside organizations may provide financing, technical assistance, international advocacy, or logistical support, but they should not dominate decision-making.
Funding practices are central to this transformation. Conventional grants often impose short deadlines, restrictive budgets, complicated applications, English-language reporting requirements, and indicators selected by donors. These systems favor organizations with professional grant-writing and financial-management departments while excluding smaller community groups.
Flexible and unrestricted financing allows local organizations to respond to changing circumstances, invest in staff, strengthen institutions, and pursue long-term strategies. Decolonial funding also recognizes that local organizations should not be required to surrender their autonomy in exchange for access to international resources.
Philanthropy faces similar questions. Much philanthropic wealth was accumulated through economic systems connected to colonialism, slavery, land dispossession, resource extraction, and racial inequality. Decolonizing philanthropy requires examining how wealth was created as well as how grants are distributed.
Community-controlled funds, participatory grantmaking, restorative investment, reparations, and trust-based philanthropy attempt to transfer decision-making authority to the people affected by inequality. These approaches replace paternalistic charity with solidarity, accountability, repair, and democratic ownership.
Knowledge, Research and Education
International development is also a system of knowledge production. Universities, consulting firms, research institutes, journals, and donor agencies determine which questions receive funding, which methods are considered rigorous, whose work is published, and which forms of evidence influence policy.
Researchers from the Global South are frequently treated as local assistants responsible for collecting data, arranging interviews, translating languages, or explaining cultural context. Northern institutions may retain control over research questions, budgets, theoretical frameworks, authorship, publication, and policy engagement.
Equitable research partnerships require shared governance, transparent budgets, fair compensation, collaborative authorship, reciprocal learning, and local ownership of research data. Research agendas should respond to locally identified needs rather than primarily serving the careers, funding requirements, and theoretical interests of foreign researchers.
Language is another source of inequality. English dominates development institutions, academic publishing, international conferences, and grant applications. This excludes many community members and scholars while allowing concepts developed in English-speaking institutions to appear universal. Multilingual research and communication are therefore essential components of epistemic justice.
Decolonizing development education involves more than adding readings by scholars from different regions. It requires reconsidering curricula, teaching methods, institutional leadership, assessment, student participation, and the economic structures surrounding universities. Students should learn how colonialism shaped development institutions and how race, class, gender, nationality, citizenship, and passport privilege influence the production of knowledge.
Decolonizing Global Health
Global health reflects many of the inequalities found throughout international development. Research priorities, funding, academic leadership, medical education, publishing, and program design are often controlled by institutions in high-income countries, even when projects primarily concern communities elsewhere.
Decolonizing global health requires shifting research leadership, funding authority, agenda setting, and institutional investment toward researchers and health systems in low- and middle-income countries. It also means confronting the colonial histories of medicine, including experimentation, racial classification, extractive research, and the marginalization of Indigenous and traditional health knowledge.
Authorship is an important measure of inequality. Researchers from countries where studies take place may be excluded from senior authorship or treated as sources of data rather than intellectual partners. Journal fees, editorial hierarchies, English-language requirements, and unequal access to research infrastructure reinforce these disparities.
Medical and public-health education should address colonial history, structural racism, migration, brain drain, pharmaceutical inequality, and unequal access to technology. Locally led implementation research can improve the relevance of health interventions by allowing communities and national institutions to determine which problems matter and how solutions should be evaluated.
Decolonization also asks whether the category of “global health” would continue to exist in its current form if health knowledge, finance, and authority were distributed more equally. The goal is not merely to diversify existing institutions but to transform the relationships that allow some countries to define health priorities for others.
Climate, Conservation and Indigenous Knowledge
Colonialism has shaped environmental policy through land seizure, resource extraction, plantation economies, mining, conservation areas, and the displacement of Indigenous peoples. Fortress conservation has frequently treated inhabited landscapes as empty wilderness and removed communities whose stewardship helped preserve those ecosystems.
Decolonizing conservation requires recognizing Indigenous land rights, restoring territories, respecting free, prior, and informed consent, and transferring environmental governance to communities. Indigenous peoples should not simply be consulted as stakeholders within projects controlled by governments or international conservation organizations.
Indigenous knowledge offers sophisticated understandings of fire, water, forests, wildlife, agriculture, weather, and ecological relationships. Collaboration between Indigenous knowledge and Western science can be valuable, but only when Indigenous communities retain authority over their knowledge, data, research goals, and methods.
Climate finance often fails to reach the communities most affected by environmental disruption. Indigenous-led and community-controlled funds seek to bypass donor bottlenecks and direct resources toward locally determined adaptation and conservation priorities.
Decolonial climate justice also connects environmental harm to colonial extraction, racial capitalism, gender inequality, and unequal consumption. Communities that contributed least to climate change frequently experience its most severe consequences while receiving inadequate resources for adaptation and recovery.
Feminist and Social-Justice Approaches
Decolonial feminism examines how colonialism interacts with patriarchy, race, class, sexuality, caste, disability, nationality, and economic inequality. It challenges development programs that treat women as a single universal category or impose Northern understandings of gender equality without considering local histories and political struggles.
Earlier development approaches often presented women primarily as vulnerable beneficiaries, unpaid caregivers, or underused sources of labor. Decolonial and gender-transformative approaches instead emphasize political power, land rights, bodily autonomy, collective organizing, economic justice, and the leadership of women and gender-diverse communities.
Feminist foreign policies and international assistance programs can support gender justice, but they may reproduce colonial relationships when donor governments define feminism for other societies. Meaningful solidarity requires supporting locally rooted movements rather than selecting causes according to the diplomatic or economic priorities of donor countries.
Humanitarian communications also influence power. Images and stories frequently portray people in the Global South as passive, helpless, impoverished, or dependent on foreign rescue. Participatory storytelling transfers narrative authority to communities, allowing people to determine how their experiences are represented and how their stories are used.
A decolonial approach recognizes that shifting work to marginalized communities is not the same as shifting power. Community participation must be supported with money, institutional resources, decision-making authority, safety, and compensation.
Digital Development, Data and Evaluation
Digital development can reproduce colonial extraction when technology companies control infrastructure, platforms, software, data, and artificial-intelligence systems used throughout the Global South. Data collected from communities may generate commercial or political value elsewhere while providing limited benefits to the people who produced it.
Digital sovereignty seeks community and national control over data, infrastructure, technical standards, and digital policy. It challenges dependence on foreign platforms and calls for laws and institutions capable of protecting local rights, languages, economies, and knowledge.
Artificial-intelligence systems may embed Western assumptions because they are trained on unequal datasets and developed by institutions with limited understanding of local contexts. Bias can affect health care, education, humanitarian assistance, language processing, identification systems, and access to public services.
Participatory technology design can reduce these risks, but participation must be more than symbolic. Communities need meaningful authority over whether technologies are introduced, what data is collected, how systems are evaluated, and who is accountable for harm.
Monitoring, evaluation, and learning are also political activities. Donors traditionally determine indicators, reporting schedules, methods, and definitions of success. Decolonizing evaluation allows communities to identify what matters, interpret results, select appropriate evidence, and use local philosophies and knowledge systems.
African-rooted and Indigenous evaluation approaches challenge the claim that standardized Western methodologies are culturally neutral. They emphasize relationships, collective well-being, historical context, community accountability, and multiple ways of understanding change.
Institutional Transformation
Decolonizing development cannot be accomplished through new terminology alone. Organizations may adopt the language of localisation, inclusion, equity, or decolonization while preserving the same leadership structures, financial controls, employment hierarchies, and institutional incentives.
Meaningful transformation requires examining who governs institutions, who controls budgets, whose knowledge is considered authoritative, who receives credit, who bears risk, and who can hold decision-makers accountable. Organizations must be willing to transfer resources and authority even when doing so reduces their own size, visibility, or influence.
Practical reforms include increasing direct funding, simplifying grant requirements, supporting multilingual communication, sharing research ownership, changing recruitment and compensation practices, strengthening local institutions, and creating mechanisms through which communities can challenge or reject programs.
Decolonization may also require international organizations to reconsider whether they should continue performing functions that local institutions can undertake. Their future role may increasingly involve solidarity, redistribution, advocacy, technical support, and the removal of international barriers rather than direct control over development programs.
Conclusion
Decolonizing international development is not simply a campaign for greater diversity within existing institutions. It is a broader effort to transform the political, economic, racial, and epistemic relationships through which development operates.
Its central questions concern power: who defines progress, who controls money, who produces knowledge, who makes decisions, who receives recognition, and who bears the consequences when programs fail. Local participation is insufficient when outside institutions retain final authority.
A decolonial approach supports self-determination, historical repair, equitable partnerships, locally controlled finance, Indigenous sovereignty, feminist justice, multilingual knowledge, and democratic accountability. It recognizes that communities are not passive recipients of development but political actors capable of defining their own futures.
The ultimate measure of decolonization is therefore not the language used by international organizations. It is whether resources, authority, knowledge ownership, and institutional power have genuinely shifted toward the people and communities whose lives are affected.
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Core Debates and Critiques of Development
Decolonising Development Studies
| Development Studies Association | Development Studies Association | Accessed July 15, 2026
Provides a sector platform for changing curricula, institutional procedures, and ways of thinking rooted in colonial histories.
Challenging Global Development: Towards Decoloniality and Justice
Collects scholarship and resources promoting decolonial development knowledge, solidarity, conviviality, and social justice.
Decolonising Development Studies: Why It Matters
Explains how European development was built through colonial extraction and why the discipline must confront that history.
Eurocentrism, Development, and the Challenge of Decolonization
| Degrowth Journal | Degrowth Journal | December 19, 2025
Examines tensions between Northern degrowth theory, Southern alternatives, and the need for decolonial dialogue without universalising one model.
Transforming the International Development Cooperation System – Mission Impossible?
| European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes | EADI | October 14, 2025
Explores whether international cooperation can overcome colonial structures through institutional reform and genuinely reciprocal partnerships.
Decolonising International Development Cooperation: Towards a Reframing
| IBON International | IBON International | March 12, 2025
Calls for replacing donor–recipient hierarchies with cooperation grounded in justice, solidarity, accountability, and historical redress.
Reflections on a Decade Working in Development and Aid
| LSE International Development | London School of Economics | January 30, 2025
Argues for local ownership, government alignment, contextual knowledge, and development practice less dependent on external templates.
Decolonizing Development Studies: Rejecting or Repurposing Development?
| Kate Meagher | The European Journal of Development Research | 2025
Considers tensions between decolonial scholarship and critical political economy in efforts to remake development studies.
Decolonising Development: Why African Solutions Must Lead
| J. Mahlangu | SAGE Advance | 2025
Critiques colonial financial institutions and argues that African knowledge, priorities, and institutions should guide development policy.
Benefits of South-South Cooperation
| Iffat Idris | Institute of Development Studies | 2025
Reviews how developing countries exchange expertise, build capacity, and pursue development goals through horizontal cooperation.
Decolonizing Foreign Aid in the Trump Era: Towards South-South Solidarity
| O. Olalere | IE School of Politics, Economics and Global Affairs | 2025
Reframes aid as solidarity rather than charity and explores South–South alternatives during a period of Northern retrenchment.
On South-South Cooperation: Assessing Its Political Relevance for Southern Peoples
| Reality of Aid Network | Reality of Aid | October 26, 2023
Evaluates South–South cooperation from the standpoint of peoples’ rights, democratic ownership, solidarity, and accountability.
Decolonising Development Studies
| Ilan Kapoor | Third World Quarterly | 2023
Examines imperial amnesia, epistemic decolonisation, and the material inequalities that must be addressed within development studies.
Rethinking Development and Decolonising Development Studies
| Springer Nature | Springer Professional | 2023
Links contemporary global crises to the need for plural, historically grounded approaches to development and social transformation.
South-South Cooperation and Decoloniality
| Emma Mawdsley | Springer Nature | 2023
Assesses whether South–South cooperation disrupts or reproduces colonial power in language, institutions, finance, and knowledge.
The More Things Change, the Less They Should Stay the Same: The Case for Recasting Development
| Melissa Leach | Institute of Development Studies | November 3, 2022
Proposes recasting development around solidarity, diverse knowledge systems, universal challenges, and locally defined transformations.
The Narrative of Decolonization of Development Aid
| Themrise Khan | IDEES | 2022
Questions simple North–South binaries and highlights power inequalities within both international aid and South–South cooperation.
Decolonisation Is a Comfortable Buzzword for the Aid Sector
| Themrise Khan | openDemocracy | January 15, 2021
Warns that decolonisation can become rhetoric unless Global South actors define priorities and confront internal inequalities.
From Degrowth and Postdevelopment Towards the Pluriverse?
| Jorge Garcia-Arias and colleagues | Environmental Politics | 2021
Compares post-development and degrowth while considering how pluriversal politics can move beyond a single model of progress.
Development Is Colonialism in Disguise
Argues that dominant development reproduces colonial extraction and presents pluriversal alternatives emerging from communities and movements.
On Babies and Bathwater: Decolonising International Development Studies
| IDS Alumni Network | Institute of Development Studies | January 9, 2018
Reflects on power, knowledge production, and what should be retained or discarded when decolonising development studies.
Decolonising Development Studies
| LSE Africa | London School of Economics | November 27, 2017
Reviews debates over aid-funded research, curriculum reform, institutional power, and whose interests development scholarship serves.
The Post-Development Dictionary Agenda: Paths to the Pluriverse
| Federico Demaria and Ashish Kothari | Third World Quarterly | 2017
Presents ecological swaraj, degrowth, and other community-rooted alternatives to conventional sustainable development.
Post-Development Discourse: Lessons for the Degrowth Movement
| Aram Ziai | Degrowth.info | July 20, 2015
Explains what degrowth can learn from post-development critiques of growth, modernization, expertise, and Northern universalism.
Humanitarian Aid, Localisation and Power
Decolonising Aid
| Centre for Humanitarian Leadership | Centre for Humanitarian Leadership | Accessed July 15, 2026
Synthesizes literature, initiatives, and practical debates surrounding efforts to decolonise humanitarian and development assistance.
The Dinosaurs of International Aid Must Adapt or Die
| Halima Begum | The Guardian | May 22, 2026
Argues that large aid institutions should transfer resources and authority to grassroots organizations or cease dominating the system.
A Radical New Business Model That Could Save International Aid
| Tiara Ataii | The Washington Post | February 24, 2025
Proposes cash-first aid and a support role for international agencies instead of costly, top-down program delivery.
It’s About Solidarity, Not Charity
| Sarah Johnson | The Guardian | January 13, 2025
Profiles Halima Begum’s call to replace paternalistic charity with solidarity, debt justice, local leadership, and power redistribution.
Locals in Sudan Are Saving Lives That International Aid Agencies Can’t Reach
| Time staff | Time | January 2025
Documents community-run Emergency Response Rooms as a locally led alternative to inaccessible and underfunded international aid.
The Decolonisation of Humanitarian Aid and Localisation: A Critical Synthesis
| Groupe URD | Humanitarian Aid on the Move | December 18, 2024
Reviews the relationship between localisation and decolonisation, emphasizing power, institutional incentives, and local agency.
Opinion: Efforts to Decolonize Development Must Include Local Languages
| Translation Glossary Project | Devex | August 23, 2024
Shows how English-dominated communication excludes communities and proposes multilingual approaches to development design and participation.
Opinion: The Limits of Localization in the Decolonization Debate
| Devex contributors | Devex | July 25, 2024
Explains why localisation alone cannot resolve the deeper political, racial, and economic roots of aid inequality.
Localisation Doesn’t Shift Power. It Deepens International Dominance
| J. Ibrahim Harb and Arbie Baguios | The New Humanitarian | July 23, 2024
Argues that donor-controlled localisation can legitimize rather than dismantle international dominance over humanitarian action.
A Colonial Mindset: Why Global Aid Agencies Need to Get Out of the Way
| Kaamil Ahmed | The Guardian | May 7, 2024
Reports how local organizations deliver context-sensitive assistance while international agencies retain most funding and decision-making.
A Mutual Aid Volunteer Reflects on a Year of War in Sudan
| Hajooj Kuka | The New Humanitarian | April 22, 2024
Describes Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms and the barriers local mutual-aid networks face in accessing international support.
How to Fund Refugee-Led Aid
| The New Humanitarian | The New Humanitarian | April 2, 2024
Explores why refugee-led organizations are excluded from localisation and how funders can overcome risk and compliance barriers.
Opinion: How to Get From Rhetoric to Reality in Decolonizing Development
| Devex contributors | Devex | February 14, 2024
Calls for transforming organizational structures, money flows, knowledge hierarchies, and definitions of expertise.
To Help Tackle Aid Inequality, Support Myanmar’s Local Intermediaries
| Anne Décobert and Tamas Wells | The New Humanitarian | August 3, 2023
Shows how locally rooted intermediaries can move resources and authority beyond tokenistic approaches to localisation.
Transforming Partnerships in International Cooperation
| Peace Direct | Peace Direct | 2023
Offers practical guidance for civil society, donors, intermediaries, and INGOs seeking more equitable international partnerships.
Opinion: Localization Isn’t Working. Here’s Why
| Lola Dare | Devex | October 26, 2022
Argues that funders must trust local leadership and adapt compliance rules to different institutional and cultural contexts.
Is ‘Decolonised Aid’ an Oxymoron?
| The New Humanitarian | Rethinking Humanitarianism | October 19, 2022
Contrasts reformist and abolitionist views of decolonising aid and questions whether the current system can become equitable.
Localisation Only Pays Lip Service to Fixing Aid’s Colonial Legacy
| Degan Ali | The New Humanitarian | February 8, 2022
Critiques localisation reforms that transfer delivery responsibilities without transferring authority, risk, money, and institutional power.
Localisation and Decolonisation: The Difference That Makes the Difference
| Peace Direct | Peace Direct | 2022
Distinguishes technical localisation reforms from deeper efforts to dismantle racism, colonial power, and unequal global institutions.
Race, Power, and Peacebuilding
| Peace Direct and partners | Peace Direct | 2022
Examines how racism and unequal global–local power shape peacebuilding and proposes decolonial changes in funding and practice.
Deep Dive: Decolonizing Aid — From Rhetoric to Action
| Devex | Devex | August 24, 2021
Surveys practical changes in leadership, funding, staffing, language, partnerships, and accountability across the aid sector.
Covid-19 Has Shown Us How to Decolonize International Development
| Peace Direct | Peace Direct | June 16, 2021
Shows how pandemic travel restrictions exposed dependence on local leadership and created openings for structural aid reform.
Time to Decolonise Aid
| Peace Direct | Peace Direct | May 10, 2021
Documents structural racism in aid and recommends shifting decision-making, resources, knowledge authority, and accountability to local actors.
What’s Stopping Localization in the Humanitarian Sector?
| Lisa Cornish | Devex | April 30, 2021
Reviews funding, risk, bureaucracy, and institutional incentives that prevent humanitarian organizations from transferring power locally.
The West’s Humanitarian Reckoning
| The New Humanitarian | The New Humanitarian | July 1, 2020
Summarizes calls to confront white supremacy, donor control, political neutrality, and exclusion within humanitarian institutions.
Locally Led Development, Funding and Philanthropy
Taking British Politics and Colonialism Out of Our Language
| Bond | Bond | Accessed July 15, 2026
Offers a language guide for removing paternalistic, politicized, and colonial terminology from development communications.
Funding to Local Actors
| Humanitarian Outcomes | Humanitarian Outcomes | Accessed July 15, 2026
Reviews Grand Bargain localisation commitments and the mechanisms through which funds reach local humanitarian organizations.
Ten Practices to Decolonize Philanthropy
| Hispanics in Philanthropy | HIP | Accessed July 15, 2026
Offers practical steps for redistributing decision-making, changing relationships, and confronting colonial assumptions in grantmaking.
Decolonising Philanthropy
| Peace Direct | Peace Direct | Accessed July 15, 2026
Presents Global South perspectives on privilege, trust, funding practice, accountability, and the transformation of philanthropy.
Participatory Development Storytelling and Decolonising Narratives
Argues that ethical storytelling requires transferring narrative authority to people represented in humanitarian communications.
The State of International Humanitarian Funding to Local and National Actors
Assesses whether donors are meeting commitments to provide more direct, flexible humanitarian funding to national and local actors.
Funding for Local and National Actors
| United Nations OCHA | Humanitarian Action | April 3, 2025
Summarizes international commitments and evidence concerning direct humanitarian finance for local and national responders.
Rethinking Development Funding: A Call for Decolonisation and Empowerment
| West Africa Civil Society Institute | WACSI | January 14, 2025
Critiques rigid donor systems and advocates flexible finance that trusts and strengthens African civil society leadership.
Funding to Local and National Actors
| Development Initiatives | Development Initiatives | 2025
Tracks the amount and share of humanitarian funding reaching local and national organizations and governments.
Locally Led Development in Practice: Decolonising Development and Shifting Power
| Bond | Bond | October 22, 2024
Explains how flexible funding, local decision-making, and changes in donor behavior can move development beyond donor control.
Decolonising Economic Development: The Role of INGOs
Examines structural adjustment, neoliberalism, corporate power, and the potential role of INGOs in redistributing economic power.
Beyond the Buzzwords: How Can We Fix Localisation to Shift Power in Humanitarian Aid?
| Hamid Foroughi and Paul R. Kelly | Bond | September 3, 2024
Identifies structural barriers that keep localisation symbolic and recommends changes in accountability, financing, and partnership design.
The Time Is Now: A Call to Practice Locally Led
| Annalisa Renna | Bond | April 8, 2024
Urges international organizations to convert commitments on decolonisation and power shifting into routine organizational practice.
Journey Towards Decolonization Stops in Bogotá
| Adeso | Adeso | December 4, 2023
Explains Adeso’s decision to reduce donor dependency and build flexible, locally controlled financing and social enterprises.
Localizing Humanitarian Aid in Ukraine: Where Is the Storm of Change?
| Charter for Change | Charter for Change | September 25, 2023
Uses a Ukraine baseline study to assess leadership, coordination, funding, participation, and policy influence in localisation.
INGOs Sign Southern-Led Pledge to Create a More Equitable Aid System by 2030
| Adeso | Adeso | November 1, 2022
Introduces a pledge requiring international organizations to confront colonial power and support a stronger local aid ecosystem.
Systems Change in Action: Adeso and the Chandler Foundation
| Adeso | Adeso | September 23, 2022
Describes efforts to dismantle discriminatory foreign-aid structures and move resources directly to affected communities.
Freeing Ourselves from Colonial, White Savior Models of Philanthropy
| C. Nicole Mason | Nonprofit Quarterly | June 16, 2022
Calls on Global North philanthropy to confront wealth’s colonial origins and replace saviorism with accountability and repair.
It’s 2022 and Decolonising Aid Finds Itself at a Crossroads
| Lena Bheeroo | Bond | January 27, 2022
Challenges aid organizations to choose structural transformation rather than minor reforms that preserve institutional power.
Becoming Locally Led as an Anti-Racist Practice
Provides a maturity framework for organizations seeking to align mission, strategy, leadership, funding, and operations with local ownership.
Are We There Yet? Localisation as the Journey Towards Locally Led Practice
| Arbie Baguios and colleagues | ODI | 2021
Maps progress and persistent power imbalances in efforts to make humanitarian and development practice locally led.
How to Confront Race and Racism in International Development
| Marta Foresti | ODI | October 5, 2020
Connects the rise of development institutions to decolonisation and calls for confronting race in policy, research, and organizations.
What the Localisation of Humanitarian Aid Really Means
| Charter for Change | Charter for Change | September 13, 2019
Defines localisation as greater autonomy and resource control for national organizations throughout the disaster-management cycle.
Power, Democracy and Decolonizing Philanthropy in the Global South
| Global Fund for Community Foundations | GFCF | December 10, 2018
Reflects on African philanthropy, democratic ownership, community power, and alternatives to externally controlled grantmaking.
Charter for Change
| Charter for Change | Charter for Change | July 31, 2015
Sets out commitments on direct funding, partnership equality, visibility, recruitment, and support for southern-based humanitarian NGOs.
Knowledge, Research and Education
Epistemic Irrelevance, Language and Passport Positionality
| Eyob Balcha Gebremariam | EADI | Accessed July 15, 2026
Describes linguistic, institutional, and mobility barriers faced by an Ethiopian scholar working in British academia.
Merit, Meritocracy, and Decolonising Knowledge for Development
| EADI contributors | EADI | Accessed July 15, 2026
Shows how supposedly neutral merit systems can reproduce structural and epistemic inequality in development education.
Pathways to Impactful and Equitable Partnerships in Research for Development
| Institute of Development Studies | IDS | Accessed July 15, 2026
Brings Global South and North partners together to co-create practical approaches to research equity.
Equitable Research Partnerships Are No Longer Optional
| Times Higher Education contributors | Times Higher Education | February 2, 2026
Provides practical recommendations for sharing knowledge, budgets, credit, outcomes, and authority across international research teams.
Rethinking International Research Partnerships for Just and Sustainable Futures
| Kwame Gyamerah | Journal of International Students | 2026
Uses Ubuntu relationality to challenge partnerships that reserve epistemic authority and research capital for Northern institutions.
Decolonising International Research Collaborations
| EADI contributors | Debating Development Research | September 30, 2024
Calls for redressing epistemic injustice and de-centering colonial assumptions in research frameworks and partnerships.
Reflections on Decolonising Knowledge for Development
| Melissa Leach and colleagues | Institute of Development Studies | February 21, 2024
Invites debate on how development institutions can change whose knowledge is funded, recognized, circulated, and used.
Decolonising Knowledge and Practice: Our New Issue
| Anandita Ghosh | Gender & Development | February 6, 2024
Introduces a special issue centered on accessible, Southern-led, feminist approaches to research and development knowledge.
A Call to Rethink African Scholars Beyond ‘Local Experts’
Challenges research systems that treat African scholars mainly as data collectors, translators, or contextual assistants.
A Decolonising Approach to Policy Impact in the Global South
| University of Nottingham researchers | Exchanges | 2024
Examines how efforts to influence policy can reproduce postcolonial hierarchies when Northern researchers dominate agendas.
Development Education and Decolonising International Partnerships in Higher Education
| S. E. Angyagre and colleagues | Policy & Practice | 2024
Draws lessons from university partnerships seeking to confront colonial histories, unequal mobility, and knowledge hierarchies.
Racism, Colonialism and Whiteness in Development
| Y. Smith and colleagues | Third World Quarterly | 2024
Analyzes how whiteness and coloniality shape development organizations, professional hierarchies, and everyday practice.
Beyond Equitable Partnerships: The Imperative of Transformative Research Collaborations
| Isabella Aboderin and colleagues | Global Social Challenges Journal | 2023
Argues that procedural fairness is insufficient without transforming the political economy of North–South research.
Decolonising Knowledge and Practice
| Gender & Development | Gender & Development | 2023
Collects feminist analyses of colonial, racist, casteist, ableist, and patriarchal power in knowledge and development practice.
Aid Is Racist, Say MPs – Academics Must Help Decolonise It
| Sunit Bagree | openDemocracy | June 24, 2022
Argues that development academics must confront structural racism instead of limiting critique to aid agencies.
Racism in the Aid Sector
| UK International Development Committee | UK Parliament | June 23, 2022
Documents paternalism, discriminatory employment, unequal partnerships, and racist public narratives within British international aid.
Aid Industry and the Politics of Knowledge Production
| Rita Adel | London School of Economics | January 11, 2022
Explores epistemic agency and how aid structures shape who can create, validate, and circulate development knowledge.
Decolonising Learning Development Through Reflective and Relational Practice
| J. Bohlmann | Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education | 2022
Shows how learning developers can integrate decolonial reflection into academic-literacy support and institutional practice.
Some Steps for Decolonising International Research-for-Development Partnerships
| EADI contributors | Debating Development Research | December 2, 2021
Proposes democratic governance, equitable budgets, shared authorship, and locally relevant impact in international research collaborations.
Reflections from Teaching African Development Using Decolonial Perspectives
| LSE International Development | London School of Economics | May 25, 2021
Describes how a decolonial course design changed teaching about African states, knowledge, agency, and development.
Decolonising the Curriculum Beyond the Surge
| Maha M. Moghli and colleagues | London Review of Education | 2021
Assesses curriculum initiatives and argues for sustained institutional change rather than short-lived diversity projects.
Students as Partners in Decolonising the Curriculum
| J. Hall and colleagues | The Journal of Educational Innovation, Partnership and Change | 2021
Presents a student–staff partnership model for grassroots curriculum change and institutional learning.
Decolonizing Development Education and the Pursuit of Social Justice
| Farhana Sultana | Human Geography | 2019
Connects curriculum, pedagogy, research methods, staffing, and classroom power to broader struggles for social justice.
Decolonizing Online Development Studies
| Samuel Spiegel and colleagues | Learning, Media and Technology | 2017
Analyzes institutional and pedagogical challenges involved in decolonising online international development education.
Whose Knowledge Counts? Development Studies Institutions and Power Relations in a Globalised World
| Hilary Standing and colleagues | IDS Bulletin | 2016
Examines institutional hierarchies that privilege Northern development knowledge and marginalize scholars and organizations elsewhere.
Decolonising Global Health
Decolonising Global Health Through Implementation Science
| D. Mehjabeen and colleagues | BMJ Open | 2026
Shows how locally led implementation research can challenge colonial assumptions and improve contextual relevance.
Decolonizing Global Health in an Age of Fragmentation
| E. K. Afriyie and colleagues | Health Policy and Planning | 2026
Calls for flexible local financing, domestic research investment, manufacturing capacity, and respectful integration of traditional knowledge.
The Localisation of Humanitarian Response to Conflict and Infectious Disease Outbreaks
| M. McGrath and colleagues | BMJ Global Health | 2025
Examines whether localisation commitments increase decision-making, funding, and leadership for national health responders.
Decolonising Global Health: An Essential Conversation in Medical Education
| Y. J. N. Lim and colleagues | The BMJ | 2025
Explains why medical education must address colonial histories, structural power imbalances, and inequitable knowledge exchange.
Decolonising Global Health Funding: Local Leadership for Equitable Research
| H. Arumugasamy and colleagues | The Lancet | 2025
Argues for shifting funding authority, agenda setting, and institutional support to researchers in low- and middle-income countries.
Decolonizing Global Health: A Scoping Review
| D. Mehjabeen and colleagues | BMC Health Services Research | 2025
Reviews definitions, aims, curricula, authorship, and gaps across the expanding decolonising global health literature.
Decolonizing Global Health: A Scoping Review of Its Key Themes
| M. Amri and colleagues | Journal of Global Health Reports | 2025
Finds broad agreement on the need to overhaul power structures while identifying conceptual and practical disagreements.
Student Experiences and Perspectives on Decolonising Global Health Education
| J. J. Infanti and colleagues | Global Health Action | 2025
Examines how students in Nordic universities experience decolonial teaching, institutional barriers, and curriculum change.
Decolonising Global Health Research: Shifting Power for Transformative Change
| Ramya Kumar, Rajat Khosla and David McCoy | PLOS Global Public Health | 2024
Develops a structural framework covering colonialism within, of, and through global health research.
Decolonising Humanitarian Health: A Scoping Review of Practical Guidance
| A. Clarke and colleagues | Conflict and Health | 2024
Synthesizes recommendations for research, education, partnerships, organizations, and humanitarian health practice.
A Road Map to Decolonise Global Health
| AmplifyChange | AmplifyChange | February 2023
Provides practical recommendations for donors, INGOs, governments, research institutions, and advocacy organizations.
The Way Forward in Decolonising Global Health
| S. Adhikari and colleagues | The Lancet Global Health | 2023
Links brain drain, migration policy, research finance, and health-system inequality to contemporary colonial power.
What Research Evidence Can Support the Decolonisation of Global Health?
| S. Ramani and colleagues | The Lancet Global Health | 2023
Calls for evidence systems that prioritize context, local realities, community knowledge, and power-aware methods.
Has Authorship in the Decolonizing Global Health Literature Been Decolonized?
| C. A. Rees and colleagues | Annals of Global Health | 2023
Shows that authors affiliated with high-income countries remain disproportionately represented in decolonisation scholarship.
Decolonizing Global Health Research: Perspectives from Global Health Trainees
| M. DeCamp and colleagues | Annals of Global Health | 2023
Explores how trainees understand colonial legacies and what educational interventions they believe are needed.
Decolonising Global Health by Decolonising Academic Publishing
| S. A. Khan and colleagues | BMJ Global Health | 2022
Proposes changes in editorial leadership, peer review, authorship, language, access, and publishing economics.
Decolonising Global Health: A Philippine Perspective
| E. C. Dee and colleagues | The Lancet | 2022
Connects colonial medicine, unequal international partnerships, and the lived realities of Philippine health systems.
What Do Global Health Practitioners Think About Decolonizing Global Health?
| M. L. Finkel and colleagues | Annals of Global Health | 2022
Reports practitioner views on equity, power asymmetry, institutional responsibility, and the meaning of decolonisation.
Decolonising Global Health in 2021: A Roadmap to Move from Rhetoric to Reform
| M. Khan and colleagues | BMJ Global Health | 2021
Defines decolonisation as challenging entrenched dominance and outlines actions for institutions, funders, researchers, and educators.
Decolonising Global Health: Beyond Reformative Roadmaps and Towards Decolonial Thought
| M. M. Chaudhuri and colleagues | BMJ Global Health | 2021
Warns against reducing decolonisation to managerial checklists without confronting capitalism, racism, and colonial knowledge.
Barriers to Decolonising Educational Partnerships in Global Health
| J. Kulesa and colleagues | BMJ Global Health | 2021
Identifies institutional, financial, and cultural barriers that reproduce colonial relationships in global health education.
Why and for Whom Are We Decolonising Global Health?
| F. M. Ong’era and colleagues | The Lancet Global Health | 2021
Centers the goals and beneficiaries of decolonisation while calling for structural changes to research and collaboration.
Recognising the Importance of Language in Decolonising Global Health
| F. Hommes and colleagues | The Lancet Global Health | 2021
Examines how language hierarchies affect participation, publication, education, and whose concepts become universal.
Decolonising Global Health: If Not Now, When?
| A. M. Büyüm and colleagues | BMJ Global Health | 2020
Calls for paradigm, leadership, knowledge, and practice shifts that repoliticize and rehistoricize global health.
Will Global Health Survive Its Decolonisation?
| Seye Abimbola | The Lancet | 2020
Asks what successful decolonisation would mean for the identity, institutions, and boundaries of global health.
Climate, Conservation and Indigenous Knowledge
Decolonize Conservation
| Survival International | Survival International | Accessed July 15, 2026
Campaigns against rights abuses committed through fortress conservation and supports Indigenous land sovereignty.
Decolonizing Climate Knowledge
| Ways of Repair contributors | Ways of Repair | Accessed July 15, 2026
Explores epistemic repair, Indigenous methodology, storytelling, and equitable relations between knowledge systems.
Decolonizing Climate Policy
| Indigenous Climate Action | Indigenous Climate Action | Accessed July 15, 2026
Develops Indigenous-led critiques and alternatives to Canadian climate policy through research and community engagement.
Decolonizing Climate Governance: Why Indigenous Knowledge Remains on the Margins
| Oludele Solaja | European Center for Populism Studies | June 2026
Calls for genuine power sharing and knowledge co-production rather than symbolic recognition of Indigenous expertise.
Braiding Knowledge: How Indigenous Expertise and Western Science Are Converging
| The Guardian | The Guardian | April 4, 2026
Profiles collaborative ecological work while emphasizing Indigenous control over knowledge, goals, and methods.
Decolonizing Conservation? Australia’s Indigenous Protected Areas
| L. Schofield | Environment and Planning E | 2026
Critically assesses whether Indigenous Protected Areas redistribute authority or align Indigenous governance with settler-state priorities.
Confronting Colonial History: Toward Healing, Just, and Equitable Conservation
| T. J. Layden and colleagues | Ecology and Society | 2025
Reviews settler-colonial conservation and proposes pathways centered on restitution, sovereignty, accountability, and healing.
Decolonizing Conservation, a Global Conversation
| S. J. Bright and contributors | Frontiers in Human Dynamics | 2025
Centers Indigenous and local voices calling for people-centered conservation built on community knowledge and authority.
Peru Court Rules in Favor of Kichwa Territorial Rights in the Amazon
| Associated Press | AP News | 2025
Reports a ruling recognizing ancestral Kichwa rights within protected areas and strengthening community-led conservation.
The Challenges of Decolonising Sustainability and the Environment in Development Studies
| Lyla Mehta | The European Journal of Development Research | 2025
Traces how extractivism and colonial ideas of pristine nature shape development and environmental policy.
Strategies for Decolonizing Climate Policy
| Indigenous Debates | Indigenous Debates | November 2024
Proposes climate policy grounded in Indigenous sovereignty, rights, knowledge systems, and relationships with land.
Changing With Our Climate
| Vox Climate | Vox | October 14, 2024
Introduces Indigenous-led adaptations to fire, ice, sea-level rise, and extreme weather rooted in sovereignty and experience.
In the Congo Basin, Environmental NGOs Step Up Efforts to Include Indigenous Populations
| Le Monde | Le Monde | September 20, 2024
Examines attempts to address exclusion and abuses affecting Bayaka communities in Central African conservation areas.
Indigenous Funds Seek to Decolonise Green Finance
| Laurie Goering | Climate Home News | March 25, 2024
Details Indigenous-designed funding mechanisms intended to move climate and nature finance directly to communities.
Decolonizing Climate Change Response: African Indigenous Knowledge and Sustainable Development
| J. O. David and colleagues | Frontiers in Sociology | 2024
Uses Ubuntu and African Indigenous knowledge to critique scientism and reshape climate education and response.
Decolonizing Meanings of Climate Crisis and Land-Based Adaptation
| Ranjan Datta | Women’s Studies International Forum | 2024
Uses decolonial feminist methods to center Indigenous women’s understandings of climate change and adaptation.
Communicating Uncertainty in Indigenous Sea Country Monitoring
| Katherine Cure and colleagues | arXiv | July 31, 2023
Presents a co-developed marine-monitoring partnership combining Traditional Ecological Knowledge and statistical methods.
Critical Next Step in the Decolonisation of Land Relations
| Forest Peoples Programme | Forest Peoples Programme | March 13, 2023
Argues that protected areas taken from Indigenous peoples should be restored to community ownership and governance.
Climate Finance Isn’t Reaching African Communities
| Climate Home News | Climate Home News | October 19, 2022
Highlights how little climate finance reaches Indigenous peoples and local communities despite their environmental contributions.
Decolonisation, Global Data Law, and Indigenous Data Sovereignty
| Jennafer Shae Roberts and Laura N. Montoya | arXiv | July 28, 2022
Connects digital neocolonialism, environmental governance, Indigenous rights, and community control over data.
Review of the Decolonizing International Biodiversity Conservation Debate
| Wageningen University researchers | Wageningen University | June 17, 2022
Reviews restitution, Indigenous leadership, colonial conservation legacies, and changing roles for international NGOs.
Decolonizing Conservation: Native Communities Know How to Protect Nature
| Jessica Hernandez | Teen Vogue | 2022
Explains how Indigenous science and community stewardship challenge Western conservation’s anti-Indigenous history.
Decolonising Conservation Policy
| Lucía Domínguez and Colin Luoma | Land | 2020
Links fortress conservation to colonial land alienation and documents harms to Indigenous peoples in Africa and Asia.
Decolonising Climate Justice: An Indigenous Perspective
| Humanitarian and Development International | HAD | 2020
Explains why Indigenous knowledge, rights, and stewardship should be central to climate mitigation and adaptation.
Feminist, Gender and Social Justice Approaches
Decolonizing Feminism: The NGO-ization Paradigm
| A. Ana | Feminist Critique | Accessed July 15, 2026
Explores how donor-driven professionalization can narrow feminist movements and obscure diverse local political traditions.
Decolonising Funding and Philanthropy in Africa for Equity and Inclusion
Amplifies African perspectives on colonial funding legacies and more equitable models of philanthropy and resource mobilization.
This Is the Work: Applying Anti-Racist and Decolonial Approaches to Policy and Advocacy
| Bond | Bond | Accessed July 15, 2026
Provides a framework for applying identity, power, anti-racism, and decolonial analysis to development policy and advocacy.
Philanthropy’s Role in Reparations and Building a Culture of Racial Repair
| Edgar Villanueva and contributors | Nonprofit Quarterly | July 3, 2026
Connects decolonizing wealth, reparations, healing, and philanthropic responsibility for accumulated racial and colonial harms.
After the Breaking: A Black Feminist Response to Retrenchment
| Nonprofit Quarterly contributors | Nonprofit Quarterly | April 8, 2026
Uses Black feminist analysis to rethink philanthropy, institutional crisis, mutual responsibility, and movement infrastructure.
Who’s Doing the Work? How to Shift Power and Not Just Workloads
| Nonprofit Quarterly contributors | Nonprofit Quarterly | February 24, 2026
Warns that community-centered philanthropy can offload labor without transferring authority, money, or institutional support.
A Decolonial Feminist Perspective on Gender Equality in Global Health
| O. Udenigwe and colleagues | Global Health Research and Policy | 2026
Critiques universal gender categories and centers lived experience shaped by patriarchy, coloniality, race, and place.
Whose Solidarity? Race, Colonialism, Economy, and the Global South
| Nonprofit Quarterly contributors | Nonprofit Quarterly | December 5, 2025
Examines racial and colonial fault lines within international economic-democracy and solidarity movements.
Towards Decolonial Gender-Transformative Development
| G. Gill and colleagues | Agenda | 2025
Evaluates Canada’s feminist assistance policy through decolonial and gender-transformative approaches to development cooperation.
Scrutinizing Feminist Foreign Policies Through Decolonial Feminism and Degrowth
| Ekaterina Zhukova and colleagues | Globalizations | 2025
Questions whether Northern feminist foreign policy reproduces neoliberalism, growth ideology, and colonial authority.
Breaking Down the Barriers to Women-Led Responses
Examines how financing systems can better resource women-led organizations in humanitarian crises and recovery.
Gender-Transformative Climate Action Rooted in Feminist Theory and Justice
| Times of India | Times of India | 2025
Highlights a framework centering marginalized women, land rights, care work, cooperatives, and feminist climate leadership.
How Feminist Foreign Policies Work to Enhance Gender Justice
| Georgetown Journal contributors | Georgetown Journal of International Affairs | February 18, 2024
Examines whether feminist foreign policies impose Northern values or support gender justice in other societies.
The Growing Movement to Make Global Philanthropy More Feminist
Reviews feminist philanthropy, women’s-rights funding gaps, and efforts to transfer resources to movement-led organizations.
Development and Foreign Aid: Feminist Contributions
| Development and Foreign Aid authors | ResearchGate | 2024
Reviews feminist critiques of Women in Development, gender mainstreaming, aid institutions, and donor agendas.
Feminist Foreign Policy to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals
| Gender in Geopolitics Institute | Gender in Geopolitics Institute | 2023
Compares national feminist foreign policies and their implications for aid, rights, representation, and the SDGs.
Decolonising Knowledge and Practice: Call for Contributions
| Gender & Development | Gender & Development | 2022
Frames questions about colonial and patriarchal power in publishing, research institutions, policy, programs, and activism.
Gender Data 4 Girls?
| Isobel Talks | arXiv | August 23, 2021
Uses participatory research in Bangladesh to critique extractive gender-data projects and strengthen local control.
Anti-Blackness Is Global and Gendered—Philanthropy’s Response Must Be Too
| Nonprofit Quarterly contributors | Nonprofit Quarterly | November 11, 2020
Calls for philanthropic strategies that address the intersection of global anti-Blackness, gender injustice, and movement underfunding.
How Liberatory Philanthropy and Restorative Investing Can Remake the Economy
| Nonprofit Quarterly contributors | Nonprofit Quarterly | July 20, 2020
Presents restorative economics and community-controlled capital as alternatives to extractive philanthropy and investment.
Reimagining International Development
| Jessica Horn and Gender & Development | Gender & Development | March 17, 2020
Calls for consciously decolonial development that learns from feminist practitioners rooted in the communities concerned.
Reimagining International Development, Volume 28 Issue 1
| Gender & Development | Gender & Development | March 2020
Collects feminist proposals for transforming development by challenging racism, colonialism, sexism, and unequal partnerships.
Resources: Reimagining International Development
| Gender & Development | Gender & Development | 2020
Provides readings on solidarity, whiteness, power, feminism, and colonial legacies in international development.
Decolonising Gender and Peacebuilding
| Heidi Hudson | Peacebuilding | 2016
Develops an African decolonial-feminist framework for understanding racialized and gendered power in post-conflict settings.
Digital Development, Evaluation and Institutional Reform
Resisting Digital Colonialism and Protecting Subaltern Agency in Africa
| S. Ayesu | Journal of Public and International Affairs | Accessed July 15, 2026
Analyzes data extraction, infrastructure dependency, and imported governance norms that constrain African digital autonomy.
The Case for Digital Sovereignty as Corrective Justice
| African Center for Technology Studies | ACTS | April 14, 2026
Frames data sovereignty as repair for longer histories of extraction, legal inequality, and technological dependence.
From Experimentation to Engagement: Participatory AI in Humanitarian Crises
| Stella Suge and colleagues | arXiv | March 23, 2026
Uses research in Kakuma to warn against participation washing and unaccountable humanitarian AI.
How Are Others Thinking About Decolonising MEL?
| INTRAC | INTRAC | November 2025
Scopes decolonial monitoring, evaluation, and learning approaches that redistribute interpretive and decision-making power.
Digital Sovereignty and Data Colonialism
| Marcus Vinícius de Freitas | Policy Center for the New South | October 2025
Argues that Global South digital sovereignty is essential to counter data extraction, dependency, and foreign platform power.
A Global South Strategy for Evaluating Research Value with ChatGPT
| Robin Nunkoo and Mike Thelwall | arXiv | August 3, 2025
Tests a country-centered method for assessing whether research serves locally defined priorities in Mauritius.
Decolonizing Monitoring and Evaluation
| Cloneshouse | Cloneshouse | April 23, 2025
Calls for communities to define success, indicators, learning priorities, and interpretations of development results.
Digital Colonialism and the Role of Local Intermediaries
| Jake Okechukwu Effoduh | Data & Policy | 2025
Examines how Big Tech and African intermediaries reproduce data exploitation, infrastructure dependency, and algorithmic bias.
Mechanisms of Invisibility: The Contradictions of Localising Humanitarian Aid
| J. Ibrahim Harb | Third World Quarterly | 2025
Argues that localisation can make colonial dominance less visible while leaving control with foreign aid organizations.
Measuring What Matters: Monitoring and Evaluation
| Vice Versa | Vice Versa | November 1, 2024
Questions whose voices and definitions of success guide monitoring and evaluation in development cooperation.
Addressing Digital Colonialism: A Path to Equitable Data Governance
| UNESCO Inclusive Policy Lab | UNESCO | August 8, 2024
Proposes equitable data governance to reduce extraction, dependency, and regional inequality in the Global South.
Generative AI and Digital Neocolonialism in Global Education
| Matthew Nyaaba, Alyson Wright and Gyu Lim Choi | arXiv | June 5, 2024
Explains how Western-biased AI can marginalize languages, knowledge, and learners in non-Western education systems.
The Case for Globalizing Fairness: Colonialism, AI, and Health in Africa
| Mercy Asiedu and colleagues | arXiv | March 5, 2024
Uses African public and expert perspectives to identify colonial dimensions of fairness in health AI.
Decolonizing M&E: What Does African Monitoring and Evaluation Look Like?
| Zazie Tolmer | UNDP Strategic Innovation | February 13, 2024
Describes experiments with African-rooted evaluation practices suited to complex development challenges.
Decolonial AI as Disenclosure
| W. J. T. Mollema | arXiv | 2024
Develops a political, ecological, and epistemic framework for dismantling colonial power in AI development.
Can Digital Aid Deliver During Humanitarian Crises?
| Michael Callen and colleagues | arXiv | December 20, 2023
Evaluates digital cash assistance in Afghanistan and considers local partnerships, access, cost, and recipient agency.
Leave No Place Behind: Improved Geolocation in Humanitarian Documents
| Enrico M. Belliardo, Kyriaki Kalimeri and Yelena Mejova | arXiv | September 6, 2023
Finds Western geographic bias in language tools and calls for more non-Western humanitarian training data.
AI Is Steeped in Big Tech’s Digital Colonialism
| Khari Johnson | Wired | 2023
Profiles Abeba Birhane’s research on biased datasets, extractive technology, and Western norms embedded in AI.
Decolonizing Evaluation: Truth, Power, and the Global Evaluation Knowledge Base
| Evaluation scholars | ResearchGate | 2023
Examines how evaluation can share power, recognize plural truths, and transform its global knowledge base.
Inside Facebook’s African Sweatshop
| Billy Perrigo | Time | February 17, 2022
Investigates low-paid African content moderation as a form of labor extraction within the global digital economy.
Examining Anti-Racism and Anti-Colonialism in an International Development Programme
| Arbie Baguios | Baring Foundation | 2022
Reviews how a foundation can change grantmaking, relationships, governance, and learning through anti-colonial practice.
From Digital Divide to Digital Justice in the Global South
| Richard Heeks | arXiv | August 22, 2021
Introduces adverse digital incorporation to explain how inclusion can still enable extraction and deepen inequality.
Security Implications of Digitalization and the Dangers of Data Colonialism
| Matthias Stürmer, Jasmin Nussbaumer and Pascal Stöckli | arXiv | July 4, 2021
Maps risks created when governments depend on private platforms for environmental, health, and development data.
How to Decolonise International Development: Some Practical Suggestions
| Duncan Green and colleagues | From Poverty to Power | December 18, 2020
Offers practical steps for individuals and organizations beginning anti-racist and decolonial change.
Decolonializing Evaluation in Africa
| Bagele Chilisa and colleagues | African Development Bank | 2020
Argues for Made in Africa evaluation grounded in local philosophies, institutions, values, and knowledge systems.
