Youth leadership in addressing environmental racism and advancing climate justice is emerging as a critical pathway to decolonial futures. Indigenous youth are articulating visions that reimagine landscapes and energy technologies, challenging traditional power structures. Environmental racism intensifies the impacts of climate change on underprivileged populations, disproportionately affecting Indigenous peoples, communities of color, and the Global South through environmental degradation and resource disparities. This study examines the essential function of youth leadership in combating environmental racism and promoting climate justice, highlighting decolonial strategies for sustainable development. This study analyzes youth-led movements to elucidate novel solutions for addressing systemic disparities and promoting ecological and social justice. How youth from affected communities resist exploitative practices, advocate for inclusive climate policies, and promote "decolonial futures" by challenging dominant power structures, prioritizing Indigenous knowledge, and fostering youth leadership as a pathway to achieving equitable, sustainable, and resilient futures.

Over the decades, low-income countries, including those in Africa, have struggled to chart their own course with social and economic development without the undue influence and restrictions of neocolonial theories, frameworks, and Western hegemonies. These ill-fitting models have often yielded only marginal results while undermining local ways of knowing and doing. Over the last 30 years, Rwanda has intentionally innovated and adapted local values and practices into its Homegrown Solutions (HGS) programs to rebuild the country from the ashes of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi and expand the HGS approach to overall socio-economic development. However, the HGS have not systematically been evaluated. Our study sought to address this gap by collecting data to help develop an evaluative framework. This paper will present the findings from literature reviews and qualitative interviews conducted with various subgroups of Rwandans, including 24 conceptualizers, government officers and technicians at the national level and 14 HGS implementing officers and beneficiaries at the district level. The project’s activities were guided by decolonial principles and values by which the team of Canadian and Rwandan researchers and local stakeholders worked together to co-create knowledge using concept mapping techniques. This presentation will discuss the concept mapping clusters generated to inform the development of a framework for HGS programs in Rwanda. Contributions to knowledge and implications for policymakers and practitioners will be discussed.

This paper argues for a holistic engagement with African Indigenous cultural knowledges, systems of thought, and communal philosophies as a means of exercising self determination within the local African context. Since the era of independence began, European colonial regimes have imposed a Eurocentric international development framework across the globe, a framework that is designed to advance Euro-American perspectives of modernity and humanity. In Africa, colonialism continues to masquerade as the only mode of achieving human advancement while surreptitiously instituting different species of the human. On one hand, colonialism categorizes the African as the subject of development, while on the other hand it designates Westerners as experts to conduct development work in Africa. My aim is to anchor the discussion of development in Africa in Indigenous cultural knowledges, systems of thought, and African traditions, thus engaging African epistemologies as a foundational knowledge base for African societies. This discussion will be guided by the following questions: What is the role of African cultural knowledges in local development initiatives? How can we resist the coloniality of international development? In what ways can we affirm Africa’s contributions to humanity? Can our collective histories, identities, and Indigenous knowledge systems serve as a decolonial dialectic that reimagines development in Africa?

Despite the growth of collaborative research in the global context, there is unequal power relationship between global Northern academic institutions and Southern partners (Connell, 2007; Nguyen, Stienstra, Gonick, Do, & Huynh, 2019). Power dynamics between researchers from knowledge-based institutions in the global North and academics and activists in the global South are usually displayed, and often reinforced, through the lack of opportunities for local partners in the global South to engage in partnership conversations. In the context of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (United Nations, 2006), the question regarding how researchers from the global North can meaningfully engage academics and activists in the global South is critical.

Building on a project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and Carleton University's International Research Seed Grant, we conducted interviews with partners, academics, and activists from Vietnam, South Africa, and India. Specifically, we ask: 1) What barriers have partners from Global South encountered in their engagement with institutions in the Global North and with powerful stakeholders in their own contexts?; 2) What do they deem important to transform these power dynamics?; And 3) How can decolonial research practices resist the Western hegemony of knowledge production? The findings challenge the ongoing impact of coloniality in academia on knowledge production, highlighting patterns of patriarchy and ableism in the global North university. We argue for the need to recognize, centre and prioritise the diversity of knowledge and expertise of those in Global South, especially with marginalized peoples with disabilities in Southern spaces and contexts.