Rebelling Against Violent Regimes: The Case of Lima’s Fog Oases

Sustainability transitions are an increasingly relevant field of research that focusses on the necessary shifts to break away from unsustainable patterns of production and consumption to achieve more sustainable scenarios. Despite being a relatively young field of research, it has made significant progress with emphasis on power, governance, and the geographies of sustainability transitions. However, such progress has failed to fully incorporate the influence of colonialism in the configuration of unsustainable systems – mainly in the Global South – that are often violent and oppressive. In that sense, scholars have recently called for including decolonial and post-colonial approaches in the analysis of sustainability transitions in order to decolonise sustainability transitions. Coloniality, understood as the persistent influence of colonialism, is a fundamental concept to achieve such aim. Building on that concept, this chapter focusses on Lima’s fog oases where land-trafficking – a violent regime – transforms a vulnerable ecosystem into an economic asset for capital accumulation. Drawing from semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis, this chapter argues that research on sustainability transitions must put the violence underpinned by coloniality as well as the role of territory on the spotlight. This way, this chapter aims to expanding the discussions on decolonising sustainability transitions.