ABSTRACT
This chapter situates North/South climate justice politics within the theoretical framework of postcolonial theory, engaging this work with thinking on decoloniality. The postcolonial condition is defined as a condition of coloniality as distinct from the post-colonial, which is a more limited framework that signifies formal independence from colonial rule. The author engages with postcolonial critiques of binary representations of the world, and of Western modernization and development as colonial practices. These claims are problematized with the help of postcolonial thinking on hybridity suggesting that colonial tools can be appropriated as a form of anti-colonial resistance. The chapter argues that North/South representational practices commonly understood to be colonial practices play such a role in global climate politics, mirroring the proposal for a New International Economic Order. Both sets of anti-colonial struggle over the global commons are examined as efforts to challenge the hegemony of the Global North, particularly the US. The author engages with a Gramscian analysis of counter-hegemony to suggest that a successful challenge to North/South power dynamics may require the prior build-up of counterhegemonic conditions within both North and South by drawing attention to common strategies that are adopted to maintain hegemony within and across the North and South.
