Decolonizing Development: Reparatory Justice for People and Planet
This excerpt introduces the longer essay by UNDP Caribbean Regional Representative Kishan Khoday on the polycrisis as it affects Small Island Developing States (SIDS) in the shadow of colonialism and the reparative justice needed to enable equitable and sustainable development.
“The injustices of the past now collided with the climate crisis of today…reparatory justice [is] therefore the common demand.”
—Sir Hillary Beckles, Vice Rector of the University of the West Indies and Chair of the CARICOM Reparations Commission.2
In an era defined by multidimensional risks and converging social, economic and environmental crises, UNDP’s global 2025 Development at Risk Report will be a timely reflection on the growing challenges of multidimensional risk and will provide opportunities to craft future development pathways. A priority in this regard will be to examine the unique subregional and local contexts that will shape this future. With a view towards contributing insights and reflections from Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and the Caribbean in particular, this background paper delves into the underlying root causes of expanding risks and vulnerabilities in the region. A particular focus is on ecological change as an existential threat to countries and communities serving as a driver of change for more risk-informed development paradigms. This analysis builds on insights and outcomes of the landmark 4th International Conference on Small Island Developing States (SIDS-4), which set a new ten-year action plan for combating multidimensional risk and vulnerability. To this end, it served as a key global platform to rethink the nature of risk and vulnerability in the region and to craft solutions that address root causes.
The focus of the new global report on risk could not be more timely, as the Caribbean emerges from a record-breaking year of climate-induced disasters and ecosystem decline, with real-time consequences for affected communities and serious risks for reversing countries’ hard-won development gains in coming years. Indeed, these risks now call into question the assumption that progress will continue on the road to the 2030 targets set under the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Ecological change is a primary animating force in this regard; an overarching existential threat to equity, justice and the future of development globally but with disproportionate impacts on SIDS. The existential risk posed by the planetary crisis for the Caribbean is no longer seen as a dystopian tale of the future. Rather, it is a hard reality which communities and practitioners face on a daily basis, threatening to derail development pathways and reverse results in coming years.3
As expressed in the conceptual framework for the UNDP 2025 Development at Risk Report, in looking at root causes of this risk profile and future solutions, an effective reading of the political context is critical. To this end, this paper takes a ‘political ecology’ approach to understanding the evolving nexus between political and ecological dimensions of fragility and transformational change. Political ecology has arisen as a framework of analysis in recent decades. It is a means to understand ways in which socio-political factors shape ecological trends and solutions. A political ecology lens offers strong benefits for understanding the divergence between political-economic actors […] that generate drivers of environmental change and those that are disproportionately impacted.
In this view, planetary change and ecological risks are not felt in a homogenous manner between countries nor within countries, with historical factors that underlay unequal nature of risks among communities. With a view towards future solutions, a political ecology lens helps take us beyond the overly technocratic discourse around ecology and risk, acknowledging the important role of socio-culture ontologies, ways in which related political paradigms inform the status quo today and the need to rethink such frames of reference to overcome barriers towards a more equitable future. At the global level this has particularly benefits for understanding the evolving development risk profile of SIDS, among the most vulnerable to the risks of planetary change, but also among the most creative and active in resetting paradigms for risk and development.
Critical to the Caribbean context, this entails a decolonial and reparatory lens.4 As noted in the recent 2024 landmark report by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Development, building future development pathways on foundations of equity and justice demands “full reparation, comprising restitution, compensation and rehabilitation,” among other factors.5 This also resonates with the most recent IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, which for the first time included a focus on the implication of colonial legacies in generating underlying vulnerability.6 As noted in these UN reports, as socio-ecological systems are in flux, so too are conventional approaches to development called into question, seen by many as ill-equipped to solve the crisis and in many ways complicit in generating the ecological crisis.
Global and regional dialogues debate ways in which development policy and practice need to adapt to the times, standing today in many ways as a discipline in crisis. In this context, “[d]o we simply proceed with the daily task of implementing the policies and approaches that exist before us, despite extreme volatility and systemic risks, or do we examine potential defects inherent in development policy and practice, defects that are often shrouded rather than elucidated by conventional discourse?”7 This question animated many of the dialogues on the road to the SIDS-4 Conference and the various potentials for action emerging from them. As noted by Rabab Fatima, UN High Representative for SIDS, the agenda emerging from SIDS-4 and the related discourse “ushers in a new era of hope and aspiration for transformative change.”8 In addition to scaled up finance and technology innovation, achieving transformation also calls on us to better understand the root causes of risk and vulnerability and to critically rethink foundational paradigms underlying development policy, including from the vantage point of decoloniality and post-colonial methods from which the Caribbean has emerged as a champion across the Global South.
The Caribbean is in the eye of the storm in this regard, a key locus of inspiration on both the existential nature of the planetary crisis and ways to rethink development towards a more equitable and just future. Decoloniality is a primary lens and methodology by which thought leaders from the Caribbean seek to embrace the social and cultural history of risk and vulnerability in the region and find contextual solutions within colonial and post-colonial legacies. To most in the region, rethinking the past is key to imagining a future defined by empowerment of communities and ecosystems. As noted by Moulon, “Risk society and emergencies are the haunting afterlives of colonial modernity” with the Caribbean having a “central locale in the global socio-ecological catastrophe.”9 As explored further below, this ‘political ecology’ of risk becomes a vital focus in rethinking development paradigms and solutions.
This helps us look beyond the often ahistorical and technocratic nature of multidimensional risk and today’s polycrisis. A view to the weight and legacies of the past and their lingering consequences represents a collective act of self-awareness and agency by and for the Caribbean. Impacts from colonial era legacies have been deep and extensive, carried forward in the post-colonial era via “the structural and dialectic relationships between extractive colonialism and its legacy of persistent poverty”.10
What follows in Section 2 below is an overview of key ecological trends reshaping the nature of development risks in the Caribbean, followed in Section 3 with an overview of colonial era drivers of fragility and the expanding reparations agenda. Sections 4 and 5 then seek to reimagine development and the colonial root causes of today’s multidimensional crisis, before exploring in Sections 6 and 7 a decolonial and reparatory approach that reimagines key pillars of development theory, such as the concept of agency, and no longer views a future development paradigm as the linear mechanistic mechanism11 but as the emergent property of a complex socio-ecological system.
Endnotes
1 Kishan Khoday is Resident Representative at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Multi-Country Office in Jamaica, from where he represents UNDP in The Bahamas, Belize, Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Jamaica and the Turks & Caicos Islands. Khoday is a scientist and lawyer, having been with the United Nations for 25 years with prior assignments in China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Email: kishan.khoday@undp.org. The views expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the United Nations, including UNDP, or the UN Member States. Copyright © UNDP (2025)
2 Hilary Beckles, Report of the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, Environmental Justice, the Climate Crisis and People of African Descent, para 42, UN Doc. A/HRC/48/78 (2021).
3 Ban Ki-moon and P. Verkooijen, “Time Is Running Out to Stop the Forces Driving a New Climate Apartheid,” Devex Opinion (2019) https://www.devex.com/news/opiniontime-is-running-out-to-stop-the-forces-driving-a-new-climate-apartheid-95841 2
4 Surya Deva, “Climate Justice: Loss and Damage,” Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Development, A/79/186, (Geneva: Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), 2024), p. 3.
5 Id., p. 8.
6 Yessenia Funes, “Colonialism Caused Climate Change,” Atmos (https://atmos.earth/ipcc-report-colonialism-climate-change/). See also IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) Working Group II on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability Geneva: IPCC, 2022).
7 Kishan Khoday, “Towards Reparatory Approaches to Development, Keynote,” remarks at the 25th SALISES Annual Conference, University of West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica, 1–3 May 2024.
8 Rabab Fatima, UN High Representative for SIDS, quoted in United Nations Press Release, “Small Islands on the Frontlines of Catastrophic Climate Crisis, Crippling Debt, Exacting Heavy Toll on Development Gains,” 27 May 2024. (https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2024/05/press-release-sids4-2024/)
9 Alex Moulton, “Modernity’s Antillean Ecologies: Dispossession, Disasters, Justice and Repair Across the Caribbean Archipelago,” Progress in Environmental Geography, Vol. 3(1), (2024), pp. 1–16 at p. 7.
10 Hilary Beckles, How Britain Underdeveloped the Caribbean – A Reparation Response to Europe’s Legacy of Plunder and Poverty, University of West Indies Press, Kingston, (2021), ix.
11 See Yuen Yuen Ang, “Doing Development in the Polycrisis,” Project Syndicate (15 Nov 2024). (https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/new-economic-development-paradigm-needed-for-climate-change-inequality-pandemics-by-yuen-yuen-ang-2024-11).
See also: “Colonialism: why leading climate scientists have finally acknowledged its link with climate change,” The Conversation (22 April 2022);
Sarah Lee, “Climate Change and Colonialism,” NumberAnalytics 27 May 2025);
Watch “Is colonialism to blame for the dire situation we face with climate change?” Aljazeera (16 October 2021);
Photo: The spread of bushfires in Australia has been influenced by preventing Indigenous people from managing their lands. Source: Bertknot/Flickr, CC BY-SA.
