In 2016, Achille Mbembe wrote Africa in the New Century, offering a critical analysis of the continent’s resilience amid globalization and the enduring legacies of colonialism. In this bold and evocative piece, Mbembe critiques the Hegelian apocalypse that portrayed Africa as an “Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature” and subverts Western narratives of Africa’s predicament in shaping its future during the age of the climate crisis. While recognizing Africa’s disproportionate vulnerability to climate change, Mbembe argued that the continent holds some of the most potent solutions to the global ecological trap overshadowing the twenty-first century. Mbembe’s insights remain relevant today, particularly in discourses on resilience building, where Africans are often portrayed as victims rather than agents in responding to and shaping solutions to climate change.

Over the past two decades, resilience building has gained impetus in development policy discourses addressing adaptation, disaster risk management, agriculture, and economic stability. Despite its conceptual ambiguities and its widespread use as a development buzzword, resilience functions as a risk-management framework designed to anticipate, avoid, plan for, cope with, recover from, and adapt to climate-related shocks and stresses in the Anthropocene. The United Nations, the World Bank, and international donors are increasingly funding projects to build resilience in “vulnerable” environments, pledging to strengthen capacities and empower communities to adapt and recover from climate crises. However, designing and financing resilience is deeply rooted in neocolonial domination, power, and knowledge production, often obscured in policy discourses.

By situating resilience governance within broader African historical and contemporary political contexts, I illustrate how resilience building does not always empower vulnerable populations but serves as a mechanism for reinforcing neocolonial hegemonic dependencies. I call for a decolonial consciousness that interrogates the historical roots of marginalization in order to reconceptualize, reimagine, and rewrite dominant discourses on resilience in Africa. In doing so, I position African (indigenous) populations not merely as passive recipients of externally imposed aid but as active agents who, despite structural and systemic constraints, continuously resist, adapt to, and contribute to alternative forms of resilience rooted in local knowledge, lived experience, care, and reciprocity.

From 1960, when several African countries gained independence to the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020, there have been over 500 scholarly works focused on African resilience. Throughout history, Africans have embedded resilience in their institutions, governance, and cultures, adapting to environmental, social, economic, and political challenges. A significant body of scholarship on resilience in Africa challenges persistent myths that portray African peoples and histories as static, devoid of agency, or inherently violent. Across the continent, indigenous knowledge systems have long played a crucial role in environmental adaptation and ecological preservation. Communities have used traditional methods to interpret ecological indicators—such as animal behavior, plant phenology, and celestial patterns—to predict rainfall, navigate extensive periods of drought, and respond to shifting climatic conditions. These practices, deeply rooted in local cosmologies and oral traditions, offer flexible, context-specific strategies that have sustained livelihoods for generations and continue to shape adaptive responses in the face of contemporary climate challenges.

However, these forms of “resilience” are rendered problematic from a development perspective precisely because they are unproven, unregulated, and not captured in techno-political registers. As a result, local knowledge systems and adaptive strategies are not often recognized in policymaking, and interventions focus on Eurocentric and scientific knowledge. These forms of Western knowledge ignore contextual knowledge and place climate change solutionism within the logic of capitalist modernism and neoliberal governance, arguing that the same capitalist systems that created the climate crisis possess the requisite qualities to address it. Such discourses neglect political concerns with the history of the climate crisis, placing technological innovations and experts as the solution. This reflects how resilience and adaptation governance obscure the long histories of epistemic violence and the asymmetrical power relations between the colonizer, experts, and African indigenous populations who are beneficiaries of resilience programming.

The postcolonial landscape of climate governance in Africa is shaped by Western hegemony, engendered as a result of colonialism and imperialism where, in its aftermath, Africans are perceived as vulnerable victims of the ecological crisis in need of aid from Western colonizers who evangelize themselves as liberators, experts, and arbiters of the truth. Crucially, contemporary rationalities of resilience programming end up reproducing neocolonial mechanisms in postcolonial Africa. It is worth noting that financial assistance from the West comes as loans, with only a limited portion allocated as grants. Funds allocated for climate change mitigation often come with conditions that, for instance, require the establishment of carbon markets or adopting renewable energy technologies sourced from donor countries, reinforcing dependencies and external control. African countries facing existential climate threats swiftly accept them, but these conditionalities pose significant threats to national sovereignty. These conditionalities risk reproducing patterns of environmental governance that limit African agency, constrain policy space, and prioritize global climate objectives over the lived needs of vulnerable communities.

Climate finance, ostensibly designed to support developing economies to build resilience, has instead entrenched global inequalities, increased the debt crisis of Africans and reinforced neocolonial economic structures. Evidence of this is compelling: While developed countries claim to have met their 2022 climate finance target with $115.9 billion, 71 percent of this amount was delivered as loans—many at market interest rates—thereby intensifying the financial burdens of vulnerable developing countries, particularly across the African continent. The World Bank’s West Africa Food Systems Resilience Project (2022–2027), which seeks to integrate climate-smart technologies to build the resiliency of farmers to tackle the problem of food insecurity in Ghana, Togo, Burkina Faso, Niger, and other countries, is funded through concessional loans. However, these loans perpetuate a cycle of dependency among recipient countries and beneficiary farmers and communities, subjecting them to discipline and control to ensure compliance with the demands of funding institutions.

Furthermore, neocolonialism in resilience building in Africa emerges in the marginalization of local knowledge and agency during project design and implementation. Thus, while many resilience projects assert their aim to empower communities, they frequently overlook the indigenous knowledge of the very people they purport to serve, thereby perpetuating injustices and neocolonial subjectivities. As I argue elsewhere, this reveals forms of coloniality where, in attempting to build resilience, experts homogenize African realities and apply the same solutions across diverse cultures. Local knowledge within African communities is dismissed as unscientific and inferior (what I term the “coloniality of knowledge”), which excludes these communities from decision-making (coloniality of power), and benefits are distributed unequally—privileging a select few while marginalizing many (coloniality of being). This top-down approach often leads to maladaptation and various forms of community resistance across the continent. Resilience interventions in Uganda have been shown to undermine local livelihoods, including among the Karamojong pastoralists and Batwa forest-dwelling communities. They highlight how long-standing indigenous knowledge systems have been overlooked in the process, thereby entrenching structural injustices, exacerbating inequalities, and ultimately reinforcing cycles of skepticism and resistance.

My research illustrates how the Frafra people in the Upper East Region of northern Ghana actively resisted aspects of the Increased Resilience to Climate Change in Northern Ghana project (2016–2022), implemented by the UNDP and the government of Ghana under the Adaptation Fund. This resistance manifested in various forms—such as rejecting project structures, boycotting commissioning events and new farm lands, and self-mobilizing to rectify dam flaws—demonstrating a critique of externally driven adaptation frameworks in Africa and a reaffirmation of local knowledge and priorities. Local resistance to the resilience project, I posit, characterize how social exclusion and injustices in climate policy illustrate the postcolonial development landscape of a colonized African continent, depicted in decades of technification, failed climate adaptation interventions, and stagnant development.

Given that Western neoliberal paradigms of climate governance have not abated in resilience praxis, the only security for African communities lies in the formalization, ownership, and affirmation of indigenous knowledge systems, cultures, and ontologies of resilience thinking. Only through this can Africans navigate the escalating challenges of climate change while resisting external pressures and emerging forms of control.

Echoing Achille Mbembe’s call for Africa to reclaim itself as a site of autonomous development, self-invention, and political imagination beyond the tutelage of the West, I propose Africanization as a way of decolonizing resilience discourses and policy in the age of climate change. As Mbembe suggests, Africa must learn to become a center unto itself, a site where new imaginaries, new concepts, new thinking, and new practices are tested and experimented with. This perspective calls for a fundamental shift away from externally imposed developmental scripts of resilience governance, towards approaches grounded in Africa’s own ecological knowledge systems, social histories, and political aspirations.

Africanizing resilience involves rethinking Western dependence in resilience building while placing value on Afrocentric agency, epistemologies, ways of knowing, and ways of being. I argue that recognizing indigenous Afrocentric identities and epistemic systems through decolonial methods and ontological plurality can be juxtaposed with Euro-Western universality as a critical paradigm to decenter the modernist hegemonic world order in the contemporary structures of resilience-thinking in the Anthropocene. African people have their own traditions, narratives and practices of resilience, which enable them to nurture their abilities and joint agency. Ama Mazama places agency at the heart of Afrocentricity, strengthened through ideals of resilience, initiatives, and choices in circumstances where Africans are involved. This deconstructs the edifices of aid dependency and places Africans at the helm of their own realities and contemporary philosophies in an enlightening manner.

Decolonizing resilience offers a non-homogenizing ground to reconceptualize and rethink neocolonial subjectivities and power disparities in resilience projects across Africa. This involves disrupting dominant ways of seeing and representing Africa and cultivating resilience in pluriversal approaches that resist the reproduction of (neo)colonial logic and principles in climate governance.  Without this, I caution that resilience praxis risks becoming devices of neocolonial hegemony and sociopolitical injustice, perpetuating the very vulnerabilities they seek to address in the Global South.