How colonial academia’s knowledge gaps and funding biases undermine global biodiversity action
Original framing: “How universities can help deliver global biodiversity goals” — Phys.org
The analysis silences voices like those of **Dr. Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt Movement** (which combined tree planting with women’s empowerment) or **Sengwer elder Koitalel Arap Samoei**, who resisted colonial forest laws in Kenya. Marginalized groups—such as pastoralists, fisherfolk, and urban poor—are rarely consulted in 'national strategies,' yet they bear the brunt of biodiversity policies (e.g., evictions for 'protected areas'). For example, the 2021 Zambia biodiversity plan excluded smallholder farmers, despite their role in maintaining 60% of the country’s agricultural biodiversity. The framing’s focus on 'universities' as actors erases the very communities most affected by these institutions’ research.
The CoP17 narrative of universities 'delivering biodiversity goals' is a **neocolonial trope**, repackaging 19th-century extractive science as 21st-century conservation.
It obscures how academic institutions—rooted in colonial knowledge hierarchies—reproduce the very structures that degrade biodiversity: **corporate capture, epistemic erasure, and top-down governance**. The solution lies not in more 'actionable science' from Northern labs, but in **pluriversal frameworks** where Indigenous land stewardship, artistic-spiritual ecologies, and divested university funds converge. Historical precedents like **Wangari Maathai’s movement** or **the Sengwer’s legal resistance** show that biodiversity thrives when power is redistributed—not when universities act as neutral brokers in a system designed to exclude the most knowledgeable stewards. The trickster question remains: *If universities were to truly serve biodiversity, would they still exist in their current form?