This interdisciplinary volume brings together African scholars to challenge dominant development and growth theories rooted in neoliberal economics and colonial legacies.

The authors advocate for an Africa-centred framework that incorporates spirituality, ecology, community, and ancestral knowledge. By critiquing Eurocentric definitions of success, progress, and modernity, the book encourages policy-makers, educators, and economists to embrace models grounded in African realities and values. The volume covers agriculture, gender, education, and governance, showing how Indigenous paradigms can offer more equitable and sustainable futures.

This reference was recommended by the Bartlett Pan-African Indigenist Collective.

The Collective is a space for critical dialogue, activism, and scholarship that foregrounds Pan-African Indigenist ways of knowing, being, and creating. Formed by members of the Bartlett community dedicated to uplifting the voices, knowledge, and cultural legacies of people of African heritage and their respective Indigenous communities and lands, it aims to challenge colonial legacies and inspire transformation within institutional structures, research and curricula. By integrating creative and scholarly practices, the Collective works to restore narratives that have been silenced or misrepresented. Their work advances decolonial efforts in higher education by creating inclusive spaces and centring diverse African knowledge systems. Bartlett Alternative recognises the Collective’s vital contribution to broadening intellectual and cultural horizons through radical inclusivity and exclusivity, and thanks them for sharing resources that foreground lived experience, land-based knowledge systems, and epistemic justice.

Department Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment