Title : Decolonizing environmental communication: Integrating indigenous African communication systems in climate change communication in Africa
Abstract:
Climate change communication in Africa has, for decades, been dominated by frameworks, vocabularies, and media forms imported from the Global North, frequently sidelining the epistemologies through which African communities have historically understood, interpreted, and responded to environmental change. This study argues that the persistent failure of many climate campaigns on the continent to generate durable behavioral and policy change is not merely a technical or logistical problem but an epistemic one, rooted in the coloniality of communication itself. Drawing on decolonial theory and the Ubuntu philosophy for development frameworks, the study examines how colonial legacies in education, language, and media have marginalized indigenous African communication systems (IACS) and argues that the persistent underperformance of many climate communication campaigns in rural and peri-urban Africa stems less from a deficit of scientific information than from a mismatch between the epistemic assumptions embedded in dominant communication models and the cultural logics through which African audiences construct meaning. Through a qualitative, interpretive review of literature spanning environmental communication, African media studies, and indigenous knowledge scholarship, the study identifies a persistent gap: existing research acknowledges indigenous ecological knowledge as content but rarely theorizes indigenous communication systems as the structural mechanism through which climate knowledge can be legitimately produced, circulated, and acted upon. The study’s original contribution is a seven-stage decolonized environmental communication framework that repositions community elders, oral traditions, and indigenous languages as co-producers of climate knowledge rather than mere translators of externally generated science. The study concludes with policy recommendations for governments, development agencies, and researchers, and argues that epistemic justice, rather than mere linguistic translation, is the precondition for climate communication that is culturally resonant, participatory, and sustainable.
Keywords: Decolonization, Environmental Communication, Climate Change, Indigenous Knowledge Systems, Africa, Indigenous Communication Systems
