Lebohang Liepollo Pheko talks to The Mint about the Brussels’ beyond-growth moment, the politics it sidestepped, and why “decolonise the climate” says what it means.
When Lebohang Liepollo Pheko walked into a flagship “beyond growth” gathering in the heart of European governance, she didn’t arrive starry-eyed. She arrived wary.
“I thought it was going to be one of these quite academic, inward-looking… post-growth, de-growth sorts of festivals,” she says, and she expected it to be “Eurocentric, Euro-centred” with little space for outward-looking debate. Her expectations, she adds, were “modest, very modest”—and the event met them.
That line—it met my low expectations—isn’t a throwaway complaint. It’s a diagnosis of a political problem that goes beyond one conference agenda. For Pheko, the danger is not simply that European institutions are late to the party. It’s that they can host an apparently radical conversation while scrubbing out the uncomfortable parts: history, culpability, and power.
A “family meeting” that won’t look outside
Pheko describes the atmosphere as alienating in a specific way: like being invited to a “European family meeting” while the neighbourhood burns. At the end, she says she framed it like this: “It’s a family meeting of people who don’t seem to understand that the neighbourhood is in crisis—and that that neighbourhood is in crisis because of them.”
Her critique lands on two linked failures.
First, tokenism. The programme offered limited space for perspectives from the majority world, and she notes the optics of flying in a small number of “global south” voices for a single panel. Even if no one explicitly calls you a token, she argues, the structure can still be tokenising: the appearance of inclusion without the redistribution of agenda-setting power.
Second, insularity. The “Brussels bubble,” as she calls it, can become self-congratulatory: Europe sorting itself out, applauding itself for being brave, while treating the rest of the world as a backdrop rather than a co-author. But Brussels decisions don’t stay in Brussels. Trade rules, debt negotiations, carbon accounting, and development finance don’t function like domestic policy seminars—they function as levers of global power.
Her point is blunt: if you claim to be rethinking the economy but refuse to recognise Europe as one community among many, you are not rethinking enough.
The missing centre: coloniality and the climate “origin story”
The sharpest part of Pheko’s argument is about what today’s beyond-growth discourse often leaves out: the origin story.
She worries that parts of the de-growth movement have “de-politicised and de-centred” the fact that today’s global economy and climate crisis emerged from a specific history—centuries of extraction tied to “the colonial imperial complex.” The planet, she says, didn’t just “warm up spontaneously.”
This matters because naming the origin story changes what solutions are even thinkable. If climate breakdown is treated as an accidental overshoot—an unfortunate technical glitch—then the “fix” can be framed as efficiency, innovation, and a better dashboard. But if climate breakdown is understood as the continuation of extraction, dispossession, and uneven power, then the remedy starts to look like reparations, restitution, and structural change—economic and political, not just technological.
She credits a handful of speakers—Vandana Shiva, Jason Hickel, Raj Patel—for making those connections more explicitly. But she refuses the idea that a few radical voices “cleanse” an institution of its responsibility. A conference cannot outsource its conscience to the keynote slot.
“Post-growth” and “de-growth”: useful, but also fluff
Ask Pheko whether the labels themselves help—post-growth, de-growth—and you don’t get a branding exercise. You get impatience.
She is not a proponent of either. They can have “levels of utility,” she says, and also “levels of fluffiness.” The risk is that they become polite umbrellas under which power remains comfortably unnamed.
Her alternative is instructive because it’s not an abstract noun. It’s a demand.
“Decolonize the climate,” she suggests. “How’s that for a banner to get behind?”
Why that phrase? Because it forces three truths into the open at once:
- Culpability: the crisis has authors, not just causes.
- Urgency: this is not incremental optimisation work.
- Continuity: “this is not a new struggle”—it’s linked to a long history of extraction and “climate imperialism.”
It also travels. Pheko is explicit that language must carry “international and universal intent.” Talk to people in her neighbourhood, she suggests, and “boohoo carbon emissions” won’t cut through; people will ask what you actually mean. The moral of the story: a politics that cannot speak across contexts is not global politics—it is regional self-talk with good microphones.
Multipolar reality, communitarian responsibility
Pheko’s vision is not “Europe bad, everywhere else good.” It’s more demanding than that. It asks Europe to grow up into a multipolar reality—recognising itself as a community among others: in community with the African Union, Asia, the Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and with the many movements resisting growth’s harms in their own contexts.
This isn’t diplomatic nicety. It’s about consequences.
She points to rightward political swings and argues that what happens in the US and Europe splashes globally: into trade relations, debt talks, carbon commitments, and the ongoing contestation between global north and global south. The “further right” the mood in the north, she says, the more it shapes what is possible elsewhere.
Against that, she calls for a “more communitarian” outlook—recognising that global politics is an ecosystem. If you’re serious about heterodox economics and alternative institutional arrangements, she argues, that ecosystem thinking has to be “front and centre.”
Beyond the pale—or beyond denial?
In the end, Pheko doesn’t deny that something is shifting. She argues that movements and “movement academia” already exist at local and regional levels, and she rejects the tidy binary between activism and scholarship—placing herself, as she puts it, at the cusp of both.
What she denies is the comforting fantasy that Europe can host a “beyond growth” moment while keeping coloniality as a footnote and reparative justice as an optional extra. A pious tone, a few radical panels, even booing at tone-deaf growth evangelism—none of that is enough if the institutional centre remains intact.
Her challenge is simple to state and hard to meet: if the neighbourhood is in crisis, the family meeting cannot be about self-improvement alone. It has to be about accountability, repair, and power—named plainly, argued openly, and translated into policy that looks outward, not just inward.
Anything less is not “beyond growth.” It’s beyond the pale.
You can hear the full interview by clicking above and read the transcript here.
