The SMC Group turned 5 recently which prompted me to reflect on our work and it evolution in our sector. I’ve been observing work to decolonise in our space for over a decade. These diverse strategies and ideas constantly inspire me, and they prompted this post around where I hope the next ten years takes us.

Decolonisation as a Buzzword

When I started, the concept was relatively unknown, and still very much on the fringes of our sector. Over time it’s been mainstreamed, and in some spaces even commercialised and exploited – but that’s to be expected of all trending concepts. I don’t mind it, except when it’s clearly being used as a hashtag without any substance behind the actions, intentions, projects, nothing. It’s just a label slapped on.

However, its emergence as a buzzword says something about the role different groups of people play, and the kind of voices and perspectives that are now finally being given the respect and space they are owed. It tells me that we have finally started to really articulate what doesn’t work in the way money and power flows in our sector, and noticed the systemic injustices that lie behind our history.

Crucially, we have also started to start looking for and then designing what should come next. In many spaces, the conversation is still very nascent. I can’t tell you the number of webinars or courses I’ve taken where the conversation around decolonisation begins and ends with ‘people and systems are very racist and that’s very bad’. I have not seen more than a very superficial understanding of decolonisation beyond race, and in many spaces the conversation needs to deepen beyond definitions.

Decolonisation, Race, Power, and History

That’s something else I noticed – in many spaces where the work around decolonisation is slow, including my work with clients, the conversations are limited to binary understandings of race. Often they are even more limited to superficial understandings of what racial diversity looks like.

However in my journey of decolonisation, I’ve noticed it’s most successful when it’s done intersectionally. That is, when you look at the role that power, privilege, oppression, systems, and history all play. It’s not limited to our sector either – it starts with at the geopolitical stage and trickles down into how money flows, grants are given, projects are designed, and impact is measured (to simplify it massively).

Decolonisation is best done when examining who speaks and why, whose voice is heard and respected and why, and really investigate what lies behind that power. It then involves power holders stepping back, making room, speaking up, and rebuilding their systems to be equitable. Preciely because it involves such a deep level of reflection and research, and for power holders to give up their place, it’s incredibly complex.

Then you add in the mess of systemic oppressions and the various institutional barriers that limit the potential to decolonise, it gets even worse. In so many parts of the world, marginalised groups are not even given the right to exist freely, never mind relative power with others to mobilise and grow.

I am purposely not naming a country, movement, campaign, etc to avoid another issue I’ve seen too much in this space – decolonisation is treated as a monolith.It’s not something done ‘over there’ by ‘them’; it involves all of us. It’s needed in every part of our planet, since there are precious few parts of our world that the colonisers left alone.

Or worse, my one example reinforces the saviour dynamic that’s already rampant. Instead I urge you to think about your own contexts, which groups are oppressed and by whom, why, and what it would take for them to grow in power.

There is No Spoon

Not to trivialise it, but I think a lot about ‘The Matrix’ in my work – and, let’s be fair, in my normal life too because it’s a masterpiece.

The solution to systemic injustice, oppression, centuries of colonial rule, and human rights violations, is never simple. Yet every time the idea of decolonisation is brought up, people want a solution. It doesn’t have to be quick, they insist, but please tell me what we need to do. But it’s not out there.

There is no one way to decolonise. The solution is hardly ever simple to identify, because the problems themselves are so layered.

I also stress that by its nature, decolonisation is not like any other methodology, because it seeks to replace the ‘one size fits all’ approach that came before. There is no one way to design an education programme, or to decolonise education in a context, or to apply a decolonial methodology to evaluate an education programme. There are several!

That’s because all the methodologies that came before it were limited, and were monolithic. ‘Take this logframe template, copy and paste it into your computer, fill out the quantitative criteria as the donor wants it, and that’s the end of your project monitoring. Rinse and repeat.’

By its very nature, decolonisation challenges that way of working, and so it cannot and should not have one set of ideas.

There is no spoon. The reality under which we work was constructed hundreds of years ago, by White colonisers and power holders, and it limits us. This is not the only way for us to work – and there is no one answer. In that reality, we ignore the historical injustices and crimes committed against people, focusing on a superficial and singular ‘answer’ to a singular perceived ‘problem’.

Limiting solutions to that framework and reality further restricts the potential for growth. Instead, only try to realise the truth – stepping away from that limited worldview allows us to address deeper questions, long-term problems including inequities and injustices, and to therefore potentially have a much larger impact.

There is no single manual that you can easily plug and play, or a template, or a handbook.

What it is though, which is so much more exciting, is an unlimited library of ideas of how we could do better. Suggestions, some tried, some untried, some with success, some less so – but all of them alternatives to what came before. There are always some templates, tools, or frameworks (hint: a lot of this library is here in my blog!)

That can either be terrifying or liberating – and I see it as the latter. It’s up to us to redesign our entire system and sector, and that’s a great place to begin, because we start by questioning the assumptions underlying all of our work.

Beginning with a blank piece of paper is so much more freeing because we can then think about the many strategies we can use to decolonise, the many partners we can work with, and maybe in different ways. All because we are now not limited by an externally-imposed, colonial mindsets of roles, needs, resources, strategies, and what constitutes M&E.

How about you? What have you observed over the past decade? What trends are exciting you, or challenging your ways of working, or inspiring new ideas?