Decolonising Environmental Sustainability: Indigenous African Ecological Thought, Planning, And Human Flourishing In Nigeria

Abstract

This paper interrogates the coloniality of contemporary environmental sustainability discourse from the standpoint of Philosophy of Education, with Nigeria as a critical reference point. It argues that dominant sustainability frameworks often present ecological care as a modern, scientific, and technocratic project, thereby marginalising indigenous African systems that had long integrated land, ecology, planning, spirituality, communal responsibility, and human flourishing. Drawing on indigenous African environmental thought, the paper shows that practices such as sacred grove conservation, shifting cultivation, intercropping, fallowing, seed preservation, manure use, water-source protection, communal land ethics, and climate-responsive architecture were not accidental cultural habits but structured ecological pedagogies. These practices reveal a worldview in which land is sacred, communal, ancestral, ecological, and moral rather than merely economic property. The paper therefore contends that environmental education and planning in Nigeria should not simply transmit imported sustainability theories but recover indigenous ecological knowledge as a legitimate source of curriculum, policy, and planning practice. It concludes that a decolonised sustainability framework must combine scientific knowledge with indigenous ecological pedagogy in order to promote ecological resilience, cultural continuity, and human flourishing.