Towards Worldview Interactions: A Review of Godwin Eli Kwadzo Dzah, Sustainable Development, International Law and African Legal Cosmologies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024)

Dr. Godwin Dzah’s thought-provoking book investigates the actual and potential contributions of Africa and its peoples, including through their rich worldviews, to the making and doing of international law, treating sustainable development as a microcosm. At its core is a vision to deploy Africa’s Indigenous worldviews to reimagine sustainable development, advance thinking on how it should be applied in international law going forward. These are issues I have also been thinking about under the “Re-Imagining Agenda 2063” Project, especially contributions to our “Re-Imagining Sustainable Development" conferences at Law and Society Association and UBC and a book volume drawing on them. Like the book under review, our basic premise under the project is that sustainable development, often defined as “development that meets the needs of the present without comprising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” is a heavily flawed concept, largely because of its anthropocentric, colonial and ecological modernist roots. Dr. Dzah’s book clearly articulates this point.

The contributions of the book develop in three parts. Part 1 sets the scene. It covers context and central theoretical underpinnings in chapters 1 and 2. Part 2 applies theoretical ideas to deconstruct the history and substance of sustainable development. In chapters 3 and 4, it examines how sustainable development has evolved and been applied internationally and in Africa, revealing some deep problems, notably colonial motivations and exclusion of African peoples. Part 3 responds to these problems by re-imagining the legal dimension of sustainable development. Under this part, chapter 5 critiques colonial treatment and legacy and revisits the potential of customary law while chapter 6 promotes African environmental ethics and allied worldviews from the global south to rethink law as something beyond the positivist’s limited notion and vision of law, presenting this analysis as a new building block for ecological law.

There is much to digest and unpack in this book. In this short commentary however, I focus on three key themes that I am most interested in and conclude by reflecting on the book’s relevance to my own evolving research agenda.