Climate change vulnerability is increasingly acknowledged as falling disproportionately on the global South and marginalised indigenous communities (Guivarch et al., 2021). However, Whyte (2017) contests dominant ahistorical narratives that attribute vulnerability to naturalised or geographical causes, as this fails to address the process of colonialism that lies at the heart of the problem. To further this valuable contention, this essay adopts a postcolonial feminist analytical lens to comprehensively analyse how the dominant narratives of climate change vulnerability are gendered and contribute to Mohanty’s (1984) critique of the Eurocentric portrayal of a homogenous ‘Third World Woman’. This essay contests the narrative of climate vulnerability as ‘natural’ by centring the global South and racialised women that have been constructed as inherent victims. Conversely, this essay contends that the simultaneous logics of and the material outcomes of colonialism lie at the heart of the problem of climate change vulnerability. The conceptualisation of ‘postcolonial’ does not refer to the demise of colonialism; rather, it serves to contest persistent colonial legacies and delve beyond the dominating Eurocentric analyses that standardise European biases (Rutazibwa and Shilliam, 2018). Adopting a postcolonial feminist framework involves interrogating such colonial legacies and problematising the marginalisation of subjugated groups such as women in the global South.

This essay proceeds by analysing the epistemological foundations of a colonial regime of truth that serves to discursively construct racial, cultural, and sexual inferiority as a rationality of colonial domination (Bhabha, 1994). Colonialism physically dominated through violent dispossession and destruction of native people, their land, cultures, and relationships with nature (Singh, 2023). To remain within the scope of this essay, the focus will centre on racial and gendered colonial constructions that have contributed to positioning colonised people and environments as ‘resources’ to be exploited (Duffy, 2018). This section contests narrow accounts of climate change vulnerability by situating the problem as rooted in persistent colonial epistemological foundations. Furthermore, colonial logics that marginalise women in the global South will be explored to contextualise rather than naturalise their subjugation that increases their climate change vulnerability. This is followed by an examination of the material implications of colonial logics and power dynamics in the context of modern approaches to ‘sustainability’ in the West. This section utilises the example of the ‘sustainable’ shift to electric vehicles that increases demands for lithium-ion batteries, thus inflicting social and environmental harm that imposes climate change vulnerability upon marginalised communities through cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Nkulu et al., 2018).

Epistemological Foundations

Dominant climate change narratives have advanced to consider vulnerability as disproportionately burdening the global South, noting drivers such as ‘inequality’ or ‘poverty’, whilst maintaining a neoliberal, individualist attribution of mutual human accountability (Guivarch et al., 2021). For example, Patwary (2012) depicts Bangladesh as uniquely geographically vulnerable, failing to consider historical colonial contributions such as the British colonial destruction of 700,000 acres of its land for tea plantations (Jenkins, 2010). This naturalisation of vulnerability fails to address the colonial power dynamics and logics at the root of ‘poverty’ or the imposition of nature as an exploitable ‘resource’. To comprehensively address this, colonialism must be understood as constructing a regime of truth that discursively produces the ‘other’ that is racially, culturally, or sexually inferior; thus, assigning power to the coloniser and advancing the teleology of colonial domination (Bhabha, 1994; Quijano, 2007). The following section will analyse this colonial regime of truth, with a focus on the colonial constructions of race, gender, and anthropocentric environmental approaches, to contend that colonialism is at the heart of climate change vulnerability.

The development of Enlightenment thinking prized ‘progression’ as driven by ‘rationality’ and ‘reason’ that was deemed natural to ‘advanced’ European races and unattainable to the racialised colonised, thus constructing them as closer to nature and exploitable ‘resources’ (Mahmud, 1999; Saini, 2019). Memmi (1974) outlines how this construction of deficiency proposes a coloniser’s requirement to ‘protect’ the colonised from themselves; therefore, excluding them from positions of power becomes their own best ‘interest’. This was directly embedded with perceptions of different environmental conditions, such as the tropics as producing people with natural moral degeneration and incapability, which proposed environmental control as a necessary colonial enterprise (Endfield, 2017). As a moral necessity to ‘civilise’ and ‘progress’, such colonial rationalities have induced climate change vulnerability by imposing environmental depletion through privatisation, ‘resource’ exploitation or mass deforestation of colonised lands (Duffy, 2018). This has led to the global North historically contributing more to global emissions and enforcing anthropocentric environmental approaches to supply markets in the global North (Ekowati et al., 2023).

This colonial construction of racial superiority facilitated the colonial domination of nature that led to “food crops destroyed, malnutrition permanently introduced, agricultural development orientated solely toward the benefit of the metropolitan countries” (Césaire, 2000; pg. 43). Sealey-Huggins (2017) delineates how this colonial structure permitted wealth to accumulate in the West and imposed capitalist economic growth as infinitely attainable, leaving previously colonised nations without financial capacity or power to respond to climate change or lead global responses. Furthermore, Parasram and Tilley (2018) outline how this imposes the hyper-consumptionist, ‘developed’ standard of Western anthropocentrism as a ‘rational’ knowledge system and diminishes alternative protective ontologies of nature as ‘irrational’ and ‘pre-modern’. This colonial imposition of anthropocentric climate change as a capitalist enterprise diminished indigenous knowledge systems, approaches to working with nature and adapting to climate change (Whyte, 2017). This argument can be strengthened by understanding this in terms of Spivak’s (1988) conceptualisation of ‘epistemic violence’ that is induced by dominant knowledge systems marginalising alternative epistemologies. This form of epistemic violence remains pertinent in contemporary international climate responses that marginalise the global South through colonial power dynamics in negotiations, permitting Eurocentric hegemony and the devaluation of alternative environmental epistemologies to persist (Sultana, 2022).

To address this, Parasram and Tilley (2018) propose that the knowledge systems of those who are suffering from colonially induced climate change vulnerability but resist colonial hegemony should be central to a global response to climate change. However, this reflects........

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