DECOLONIAL THINKING, SYSTEMS THINKING AND INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION: REFLECTIONS ON THE POSSIBILITY OF UNITING THESE WORLDS THROUGH THE MODEL ZONE APPROACH.

Carolina Aranzazu Osorio, Country Representative, Nous Cims Foundation in Colombia.

“When a system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to lift the system to a higher order.”[1] The system is a system that is far from equilibrium.

To have an ethical position based on deep discomfort[2] about racism, classism and other colonial legacies, and to work in the international cooperation sector – which various critical views of the global south make us understand as a form of neocolonialism – seems a great contradiction.

Thus, from the contradiction, unraveling questions that I have been asking myself for several years, how to approach the tension between naivety and hope, or rather, how to combat learned hopelessness, I will now offer some reflections, concepts, questions and ideas on how to travel this path.

The starting point (or the headlines that resonate the most): a world in chaos and international cooperation that has not generated the expected “impacts”.

Repositioning of the most radical right wing, inequality, polarization, regression in the rights gained, increase in migratory flows, what in prospective are called wild cards: pandemics, wars, environmental catastrophes. Total uncertainty!

The countries of the global south are facing highly accelerated changes, driven by the countries of the global north: the triple transition: digital, ecological and socioeconomic(Fundación Carolina and Oxfam Intermón, 2022). As UNDP states in its Human Development Report 2020 ¿ Why, despite all our wealth and technologies, are we so stagnant? Is it possible to mobilize action to address globally shared challenges in an intensely polarized world?

Following the collective fear generated by the covi-19 pandemic, UNDP in its 2020 Human Development Report was more radical, and put forward the following premises:

“In fact, the pressures we exert on the planet are already so high that scientists are studying whether the Earth has entered an entirely new geological epoch: the Anthropocene, the age of humans. This means that we are the first people to live in an era defined by human choices, in which the dominant risk to our survival is ourselves.

To survive and thrive in this new era, we must chart a new path of progress that respects the intertwined destinies of people and planet, and recognizes that the material and carbon footprint of those who have the most is undermining the opportunities of those who have the least.”

Additionally (or precisely as part of the causes?), how we have done it in international cooperation has not worked. Although there are many valuable experiences of changes in the lives of people participating in different projects, international cooperation as a system has not been able to fulfill the promise of value that it abandons, it has not been able to have a collective impact or change the structures of the States “in developing countries”. After decades of investment in “transforming projects”, international cooperation has not ceased to be necessary… that is to say, it has not promoted structural changes.

This systematic way of operating of the Global North is replicated in the world system of international cooperation. The categorization of “developed countries”, “third world countries”, “developing countries”, “official development aid” serves this system and this vision of superiority.

As Professor Sergio Calundungo said in the course on Decolonization and NGOs (2024)[3], “we are part of a colonial machine” [] … NGOs become instruments of the system, we are functional because we put patches “to show how good we are”.

Amitabh Behar (2024[4]), executive director of Oxfam International puts it in a very interesting way in his article “How to get from rhetoric to reality in decolonizing development”:

The development sector is a mirror and reflection of how power is concentrated within a few groups in the global order, and cannot be separated from the broader political economy.

It is imperative that the global leadership of the [international development cooperation] sector channel positive momentum toward a shift in power by decolonizing areas such as organizational design and structure, the distribution of money, and the way knowledge and competence are valued. “Any effort toward decolonization that does not address the redistribution and equitable decision-making of financial resources (money) will remain an empty and hollow effort.”

Luciana Peker, Argentine feminist and journalist, makes us reflect in a cruder way when she analyzes the withdrawal of international aid workers from territories in crisis: “to be colonial and to erase oneself is to be doubly colonial” []… “Deconstruction is not destruction, especially in scenarios where the colonial presence was already exercised and territories were left devastated by poverty, inequality and lack of economic sovereignty and with weak democracies” (Peker, 2024[5]).

In this bleak context, it seems that we are living a civilizational crisis. That as he quotes the adaptation of the old phrase the master Aníbal Quijano in his article the windmills of Latin America, “the new has not finished being born and the old has not finished dying”[6].

Concepts that help me to problematize the desolation and discomfort, which bring in themselves, proposals for transformation: decolonial thinking, epistemologies of the south, epistemic justice, intercultural translation and ecology of knowledge.

Beyond the complaint, fortunately we still find social, academic and political scenarios where we can breathe hope and love and, above all, where we find new lenses not only to problematize, but also to think of possible ways out. Perhaps not to concrete solutions, but to countless possibilities to move our lives and our work in a more coherent and inspiring way.

Hence, frameworks of thought such as decoloniality and complexity theory resonate in my head as the answers I have been searching for. In this sense, Sousa Santos (2018) puts forward a set of premises that I find absolutely illuminating:

  • We must be aware of the fact that the diversity of world experience is inexhaustible and, therefore, cannot be explained by a single general theory: the Eurocentric view of how the universe and societies work (or in this author’s words, Dominant Epistemologies of the Global North).
  • From the point of view of the Epistemologies of the South, the Epistemologies of the North have made a decisive contribution by turning the scientific knowledge developed in the global North into the hegemonic way of representing the world as their own and transforming it according to their own needs and aspirations. In this way, scientific knowledge, combined with superior economic and military power, guaranteed the global North imperial domination of the world in the modern era up to the present day.
  • The cognitive experience of the world is extremely diverse and the absolute priority given to modern science provoked a massive epistemicide (the destruction of rival knowledges considered as non-scientific), which now demands to be repaired. As a result, there is no global social justice without global cognitive justice.
  • It is also necessary to assume that our time is a period of unprecedented transition in which we face modern problems for which there are no modern solutions..

In this scenario, the concept of Epistemologies of the South (also coined by Sousa Santos) makes complete sense: “Epistemologies of the South refer to the production and validation of knowledge anchored in the experiences of resistance of all social groups that have systematically suffered injustice, oppression and destruction caused by capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy. The aim of the Epistemologies of the South is to enable oppressed social groups to represent the world as their own and on their own terms, for only then can they change it according to their own aspirations.”

To speak of epistemologies of the global North and the global South leads inescapably to speak of epistemic justice. “Epistemic justice consists of combating the forms of exclusion and silencing of non-Western knowledge, and promoting a horizontal dialogue between different knowledges, where no knowledge is considered superior to any other in a predetermined manner.” Epistemic justice is not only a recognition of those knowledges, but also an effort to rescue, revitalize and legitimize forms of knowledge that have been stripped of their value by global systems of power” (Sousa Santos, 2014).

Other authors such as María Lugones and Silvia Rivera propose other related concepts such as gender coloniality, epistemic intersectionality and epistemic plurality, where they delve much deeper into the intersection of gender, race and class and therefore, in the active valuation of other forms of knowledge produced by racialized people and women, especially those who are impoverished, indigenous or Afro-descendants. They propose then to value from oral narratives to spiritual practices, as essential to build a more inclusive and equitable knowledge, and therefore, to promote a redistribution of the power to produce it and legitimize it as valid.

From the above, new questions arise. If the epistemologies of the Global North seem so different and so distant from the epistemologies of the Global South, how to carry out a process of translation? How to build bridges to have other types of conversations between “these opposite worlds” that lead to different actions? It is here where other highly valuable concepts appear for this exercise of analysis in search of answers: intercultural translation and the ecology of knowledge.

Sousa Santos (2014) states that the ecology of knowledge and intercultural translation are “the tools that turn the diversity of knowledge into a powerful resource by making possible the expanded intelligibility of contexts of oppression and resistance”. For his part, Mandujano (2017) posits that intercultural translation is a tool for epistemic justice and is the means to arrive at an ecology of knowledges.

It is necessary and urgent to recognize that there are other systems of thought, other methodologies of research and knowledge generation (what María Lugones calls recognition of different cosmologies ). It is necessary to raise awareness, in the deepest sense of the word. We are missing out on the immense beauty and richness of the world by ignoring and making invisible the knowledge and wisdom of other cultures that have been historically dominated. Faced with the great complexity of today’s challenges, it would be short-sighted and unintelligent not to open our eyes and hearts to weave together the known and the unknown in order to achieve different things. To build a scenario where indigenous, Afro-descendant, peasant, peripheral urban cosmologies manifest themselves in their own ways, without being reduced to demonstrative events (exoticization of our culture).

Another important recognition is that we also need bridges, tools, translation exercises. When I speak of translation, I do not mean that “those of us from the South” should make the effort to make ourselves understood “with the interlocutors from the North”. I am referring then to understanding and adopting intercultural translation devices that allow us to really advance – dreaming that this is possible – towards an ecology of knowledge.

Again, from the tension between naivety and hope, we cannot fall into the trap of cultural appropriation, which ultimately translates into a tool of domination (Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui).

As Boaventura de Sousa rightly says, it is not a matter of seeking exact equivalences between concepts, but of constructing forms that allow, on the one hand, mutual understanding and, on the other, the coexistence of differences. I consider this substantive point, in a decolonial key, we coexist, we co-create, we do not impose “our truth” as unique, valid, legitimate and universal.

And in this complex process, I insist on recognizing that we are inhabited by contraction. Yes, because, although we have shared ideals and in theory we agree on some fundamental bases (life, the Well-Being or the GoodLiving depending on the place we inhabit), our mental configuration is crossed by the Western worldview… our system of law, our structure of “State”, our education, our media.

There is a gap, a disconnect. Just as our human body has had the same DNA for millions of years, our societies (our systems) have been operating with a similar mindset for the last century. And it turns out that both our bodies and our societies are facing threats, stimuli, phenomena and, in short, enormous challenges that have mutated dizzyingly in the last ten years.

The paradox is that we seek to address our health, our well-being and our major social challenges with the same tools and understandings that emerged from mental models of several hundred years ago. Hence, our proposals for change must bring other frameworks for thinking, other frameworks for learning and other frameworks for measurement. This is not merely an epistemic question (which is already profoundly important and necessary), it is above all an ontological question. The lenses through which we look at, understand and describe the world around us determine everything we promote.

This approach sounds rather abstract, ambitious, indeed, utopian. But for the purposes of this reflective exercise of writing, I would like to propose some ideas that I believe can guide the wonderful challenge of consolidating the model zones both in Colombia and in Senegal as an attempt to pilot a prototype of social innovation in the key of decolonization.

The Model Zones bet. A proposal for a different kind of international cooperation and a laboratory to test these hypotheses.

Fundación Nous Cims has opted for a strategy of geographical concentration in two countries: Senegal and Colombia, in which we will focus our efforts during a time horizon of no less than 10 years, in turn, in two specific territories.

The strategic framework of the international cooperation area (known as the Global Development area) challenges us to consolidate four “model zones”, two in each country. The model zones are configured as a long-term territorial focus -if we want to think of it as a macro program- that proposes its own governance scheme: thematic groups and a driving group made up of diverse actors, both public, social and private. There are no projects or lines of action designed a priori, everything must emerge from the theories of change that we build together in a permanent process of consultation, co-creation and knowledge management -or rather, ecology of knowledge-.

In principle, the foundations on which the model zone strategy is based are decolonial thinking and systemic thinking, as it proposes a paradigm shift in the way of doing “international development cooperation” as it seeks to subvert the historical relationship of donor-project implementers. In this sense, it proposes a redistribution of power and a real involvement of local actors in decision-making, in a logic of co-responsibility and agency.

Taking up Amitabh Behar’ s (2024) proposal to decolonize international cooperation through profound changes in i) design and structures, ii) distribution of money, iii) knowledge and competencies and iv) theory of change, I find it interesting to make a self-assessment exercise and an analogy with our model zone approach:

  1. Decolonize design and structures: We propose a governance specific to the model zones through thematic groups and motor groups. This is not a merely technical or operational structure; it is proposed as a strategic relationship scheme that dynamizes and promotes tools for the aforementioned intercultural translation and ecology of knowledge, and that, as an ultimate goal, contributes to acupuncture in local systems. That is to say, to contribute to generate changes in the quality of the relationships of those systems that make up the model zones.
  2. Decolonize money: the implementation of the projects and the dynamization actions of the model zones is done directly by the social organizations. Although Fundación Nous Cims is the financing entity, it does not implement, but only dynamizes and acts as a container to sustain the co-creation process. Additionally, the selected projects arise from the theory of change built by the local actors that have joined the process (through the proposed governance scheme).
  3. Decolonizing knowledge and competencies: We have the challenge of generating a simultaneous process of knowledge management that is truly specific to the model zones and the actors involved. Hence, thinking about methodologies and tools such as dialogue of knowledge, decolonial language and communication, graphic documentation and community communication, among others, is part of the monitoring and collective learning exercise.

In addition, the indicators that will trace this monitoring will be agreed with the local stakeholders involved in the construction of the theories of change for each model zone.

4. Decolonizing the theory of change: “Addressing this issue would mean reversing the power dynamics in the development sector by envisioning a “theory of change” in which ideas, designs and decision-making are bottom-up. This change cannot occur in isolation and would have to be accompanied by the above points about decolonizing money, structures and knowledge.” . Particularly on this point, I consider that the Model Zones are a laboratory for this purpose. Before implementing specific projects, the actors involved in the governance of the model zone will work both in the diagnostic phase and in the construction of the theories of change for each line of work as a gateway to the system where it is inserted (nutrition, education and employability and youth inclusion). The Nous Cims Foundation team does not propose a priori logical frameworks. Everything arises from the co-responsibility and involvement of the members of the thematic groups and the driving groups.

This proposal, which is quite inspiring for its novelty in the way it promotes processes financed by international cooperation, also raises quite challenging questions: How to achieve it? How to sustain this type of process over time, with a truly participatory and decolonial approach if one of the legacies of Western thinking is precisely to have a linear, academic and fragmented way of thinking?

It is a challenge to recover the common sense (that the ancestral peoples of different parts of the global South have) about systemic thinking and interdependence. Once again, concepts appear that are paving the way towards some answers: systemic thinking and U Theory.

Although these concepts provide a much broader reflection, perhaps for another article and several academic theses, in this last part I will try to mention the most revealing elements for me, as they suggest totally transgressive frameworks of thought and design, useful for our great task of consolidating the model zones[7]:

  • The quality of the results of any kind of system is a function of the quality of the relationships between the stakeholders that comprise it. And to change the quality of the relationships, we need to change the mindset from a “silo view” to a systems view, we need to change the consciousness from an ego-system focused view to an eco-system focused view.
  • “You cannot change a system, until you transform consciousness” In other words, “you cannot change a system until you transform the mentality of the people who are making that system a reality “.
  • Both leadership and change have an invisible dimension. If we want to change results, we must change the quality of relationships. . To achieve a change in relationships (behavioral changes) we need a support structure, tools that accompany the path to this transformation, to build collective capacity.
  • The social field: is the quality of the relationships between the stakeholders of a system that collectively generate X or Y results. Hence, the energy should be focused on changing the quality of the social field from a toxic one to a co-creative one, from a merely transactional one to a transformational one.

Thinking about the role that model zones could play in the local systems where they are inserted, they could effectively be small islands that contribute to their evolution towards their best future potential.

By diverting attention away from the pursuit of big change and instead targeting small strategic achievements, these change agents operating within companies [for our case, operating within the Model Zones process] demonstrate possibilities for a better future. (World Economic Forum, 2024[8]).

A conceptual and methodological framework that is quite powerful for its level of depth, and that could help us move towards these strategic achievements or the consolidation of these fertile and healthy grounds, is the U-Theory .

Theory U was developed by the academic Otto Scharmer, and seeks to facilitate processes of deep change and transformation in individuals, organizations and societies. Essentially this theory focuses on the ability to “witness” and co-create emerging futures through a process of connecting with deeper sources of knowledge and creativity.

In this journey of collective construction, learning to deepen the levels of listening is the key. He invites to generate meaningful dialogues where egos and control can be transcended to let the new and the unknown emerge. Before moving to action, he proposes to allow emerging ideas and solutions to manifest and take shape. Once the deeper ideas that emerge from a system that has gone almost the full path of the U (four levels of listening) move to the co-creation and prototyping phase. In our language move to the phase of concrete projects of the model area.

In the context of decolonization and intercultural translation, Theory U can be a powerful tool for facilitating authentic dialogues between the diverse actors in the thematic groups and the driving groups in the model zones, to overcome cultural barriers and co-create solutions that honor diverse perspectives and foster a true ecology of knowledge.

The call to action to the actors who are part of this strategy is to have the courage and to have an open mind and heart to listen at deeper levels and to act concretely on issues that are truly significant for people’s lives. To paraphrase Otto Scharmer, to lead from the future that is emerging from our maximum potential.

Finally, as a reminder to keep fighting learned hopelessness: To remind ourselves of the power of small revolutions, of how exciting our work can be in laying healthy ground for creativity, innovation and mutual care for those who join in the collective long-term commitment.

 

Bibliography

[1] Nobel Laureate, Ilya Prigozhin, quoted by Otto Scharmer in the U-Lab course Leading from the Emerging Future, cohort 2024.

[2] I have not directly embodied discrimination or violence because of my skin color or ethnicity, but I can enunciate myself from class consciousness, being a “lower class -now, emerging middle class- woman from Colombia” who has achieved social mobility thanks to public education, a great personal effort, and most certainly, the support of my mother and many other women.

[3] Introductory course Decolonization and NGOs, first cohort 2024. Promoted by Red AcapaAcá (formerly The Sherwood Way) and Clacso.

[4] Executive Director of Oxfam International. See full article here.

[5] Text read by the author during the introductory course Decolonization and NGOs, first cohort 2024. Promoted by Red AcapaAcá (formerly The Sherwood Way) and Clacso.

[6] Adapted from a phrase of the Marxist philosopher and theoretician Antonio Gramsci. Taken from the article Don Quixote and the windmills in Latin America, Quijano, 2005.

[7] Excerpts from the U-Lab course Leading from the Emerging Future, cohort 2024, based on the book Theory U by the same author Otto Scharmer.

[8] Weekly bulletin “3 labor trends”, issue 29.

Resumen de privacidad

Our website uses its own and third party cookies. A cookie is a file that is downloaded to your computer when accessing certain web pages to, among other purposes, ensure the correct functioning of the web page, allow faster access to the selected service, store and retrieve information about user navigation  and the equipment used, and even, depending on the information the cookie contains, they can be used to recognize a returning user. Cookies are only associated with an anonymous user and the computer or device. They do not provide references to personal data, unless expressly authorized by the user.

The user can, at all times, accept or reject installed cookies that are not strictly necessary for the proper functioning of the website and service access. To able or dissable you must navigate to the Cookie Setting Panel provided in our website.

Likewise, you can configure your browser at any time without damaging the User's ability to access the contents. However, we inform you that the rejection of cookies may decrease the proper functioning of the website.