Decoloniality, governance and development

Decolonial scholarship is concerned with how governing unfolds through the imposition of development as a universalized narrative and project of civilization. However, decolonial scholars are concerned with something else too: the articulation of the erasure, extraction, destitution, enclosure, and silencing that those operations of governing entail. To further explain the notion of coloniality as erasure, this chapter refers to it as the production of a plurality of social experiences as an absence from history and from contemporaneity. The text delves into the experience of the counter-plantation system in Haiti as studied by Jean Casimir from a decolonial perspective while introducing elements of a decolonial (dis)engagement with governance and development. The focus is on Latin American and to some extent Caribbean and South-African anti-colonial genealogies that have inspired contemporary analyses of coloniality. The chapter is divided in seven sections that introduce the notions of coloniality of knowledge, governance, power, development, and gender in relation to governance and development scholarship. The exposition is organized in relation to post-development and post-colonial schools of thought to highlight similarities, specificities, and tensions with decoloniality.