Chapter 5 argues that an alternative ontological basis, derived from non-Western ontologies, is both possible and urgent for renewing sustainable development. It analyses how the voice of the Global South; particularly Africa, can improve the discourse on sustainable development by evolving a view on the importance of customary law, ethics, and Indigenous norms as law. It echoes the idea of ‘ecology of knowledges’ and the legal value of reviving non-Western epistemologies for sustainable development. The spotlighting of ethics, customary norms, and other forms of local and Indigenous knowledge as legal norms has been done before. However, in this book, I extend the discussion even further and do so through a comparative analysis with other bodies of legal ideas and normativity like transnational law, legal pluralism, and social construction as law in themselves. In this process, I give these ideas a unique twist for the purposes of the overall critical perspective of this project by demonstrating their usefulness for foregrounding customary law or Indigenous knowledge as law. The discussion refracts the idea of reimagining sustainable development praxis through the lens of oft-neglected African legal cosmologies, and how such experiences can provide helpful signposts in Africa and elsewhere.

Chapter 2 analyses some foundational ideas relied upon in the book. This conceptual base comprises an analysis of nature, the environment, development, and sustainable development. These concepts are discussed as a progressive movement of a complex ideation: where nature is conceptualised as the starting point, later becomes the environment, then advances to become development, and is finally transformed into sustainable development. I employ Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) in my analysis of neo-imperial ideologies and allied Eurocentric philosophies and how these are embedded in the contemporary language of sustainable development. At each stage of the analysis, I highlight the significance of human agency as the defining character of the transformations that occur within this conceptual fluidity. It accounts for the persistence of the subtext of Eurocentrism and demonstrates how the interplay of law, politics, ethics, and history as sustainable development is established upon different elements of both law and non-law theories. The analysis in this chapter is refracted through ’Afrosensitivity’, which I describe as a reaction to Africa as a conceptual tool in sustainable development discourse, and as a conscious, alternative route for imprinting African legal cosmologies on this global phenomenon called sustainable development.

This book concludes by reiterating the importance of avoiding grand narratives in research on sustainable development in international law. While each chapter revolves around its unique theme, my adoption of TWAIL helped unite these separate parts to tell a single story on Africa’s intersection with sustainable development’s legal evolution, conceptualisation, and implementation. Even so, this book is more than just writing about sustainable development or Africa as it deeply explores how international law should evolve, going forward. Finally, I end this book by drawing on TWAIL’s hopeful agenda by foreshadowing my future research interests in re-reading the law and politics of ecological crises as everyday occurrences and not as episodic events in international law.