Post-development: From the Critique of Development to a Pluriverse of Alternatives

This chapter lays out both the critique of the oxymoron sustainable development as well as the potential and nuances of a post-development agenda. Post-development is generally meant as an era or approach in which development would no longer be the central organizing principle of social life.

We highlight the contribution by Joan Martinez Alier with an ecological critique to development and his work on the global movement for environmental justice to show that activists should be considered as theory and knowledge producers in their own right. We then propose to deepen and widen a research, dialogue and action agenda for activists, policy makers and scholars on a variety of worldviews and practices relating to our collective search for an ecologically wise and socially just world. This could be one base in the search for alternatives to United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, in an attempt to truly ‘transforming the world’. In fact, it is an agenda towards the pluriverse: ‘a world where many worlds fit’, as the Zapatista say.