Linking transformative sustainability education with knowledge decoloniality: insights from professional forestry training in Tanzania - Dr Mathew Bukhi Mabele, University of Dodoma, Tanzania

Recent debates about transformative sustainability education have emphasised for a reconsideration of dominant pedagogies and forms of education to respond to complex, uncertain and evolving socio-ecological challenges. However, the debates have limitedly reflected on legacies of colonial sciences and how a surging movement for knowledge decoloniality could foster the needed transformation for different ways of thinking and acting about the challenges. I hereby address this gap by linking the two bodies of literature through an examination of professional forestry training in Tanzania. Drawing on expert interviews, documentary reviews and personal research and education experiences in Tanzania’s Miombo forests, I show that the training is rooted in colonial forestry ideals that understate human dimensions, isolate forestry science and practice from other disciplines and land use practices, label local forest uses as ‘disturbances’ and encourage knowledge consensus over diversity. These produce inadequate understandings of the socio-ecological complexities and inattention on substantive social injustices. I then propose a transformative forestry learning to facilitate decolonial deconstruction of the ideals, enable foresters’ pluralistic understandings of human-environment interactions and grow into alternative just socio-ecologies. Transformative forestry learning thus concerns the whole system re-design to rethink about epistemological and ontological assumptions that drive current actions around the interactions. I conclude that transformative sustainability education transcends well with innovations in methodologies and knowledge foundations that dismantle colonial scientific legacies in assessing the interactions in socio-politically complex, diverse and multiple-use ecosystems such as those in Tanzania and beyond.

Keywords: Decolonial deconstruction, Knowledge decoloniality, Transformative forestry learning, Miombo forests, Tanzania

This event is hybrid, please click here to register to receive the Zoom link