Postdevelopment, Decoloniality and CDSC’s Ecocentric Challenge

This colloquium will explore the emergence of “Postdevelopment” (PD) within the field of communication for development and social change (CDSC), focusing on its bio-centric elements linked to indigenous epistemologies and concepts of degrowth and decoloniality.

The session will examine how PD has reframed environmental considerations within CDSC by addressing how the expansion of extractive economies under neoliberal and later progressive governments in Latin America and beyond has driven a shift toward PD. As a development discourse, PD has encouraged a move toward civil society and nature’s rights, moving away from official, top-down governance structures and human-nature relationships rooted in capitalism. Additionally, PD scholarship grounded in non-Western epistemologies has catalyzed a “bio-centric turn” in CDSC, fostering alternative development paradigms.

Murphy suggests that PD presents two significant challenges to traditional CDSC frameworks: first, a broad critique of growth-centered development ideologies that privilege Euro-American expertise and technocracy, and second, the radical notion that nations can redefine development by drawing on non-Western concepts of societal well-being while respecting planetary biophysical limits.