This presentation explores how colonisation continues to live on in our frameworks and institutions, and how even well-intentioned initiatives like the Inner Development Goals can replicate patterns of exclusion if left unexamined. From a Global South perspective, it invites us to re-pattern inner development by widening authorship, grounding in lived realities, and bridging frameworks with the diverse knowledges and voices of our shared world.

Country: India
IDG HUB: IDG Global Creators of Peace Network
Link to website: http://www.spaziodantian.org
Link to presentation: DECOLONISING INNER DEVELOPMENT

This project began at the Caux IDG Forum 2025, where I co-hosted a dialogue circle during the Pro Action Café, that surfaced deep unease about how the Inner Development Goals are currently framed and disseminated. From that moment, the inquiry into Decolonising Inner Development has expanded: I have since convened a three-part global conversation series (August–September 2025) with the support of the InnerDevelopment@Work community, open to the wider public, which has brought together practitioners, researchers, and community leaders across continents.

The achievement so far has been to create a dialogic space where people could name both the personal and systemic imprints of colonisation: from language loss and cultural invisibility to the inequities of access within the IDG ecosystem itself. Breakout dialogues and collective harvesting have generated insights that will be shared with the IDG Foundation and the wider network as inputs for reflection and change.

The impact has been twofold. Individually, participants report feeling encouraged to carry this conversation into their own hubs, communities, and organisations. Collectively, the series has begun to reframe decolonisation not as opposition but as re-patterning: widening authorship, redesigning access, integrating more-than-human kinship, and questioning the comfort of universals that erase difference.

Over the years, I have learnt that decolonisation is an ongoing ethic rather than a project with an end point. It requires humility, courage, and vigilance, especially because even frameworks meant to liberate can unconsciously replicate patterns of exclusion. The work ahead is to keep the conversation alive in public, to bridge frameworks with lived realities, and to invite the IDG community into deeper structural self-reflection.

This project speaks directly to the Summit theme of Bridging Polarities by addressing one of the most urgent tensions in the IDG ecosystem: the gap between global frameworks and lived realities. At Caux and through the subsequent conversation series, participants named how frameworks such as the IDGs can both inspire transformation and unintentionally reproduce patterns of exclusion. The polarity is clear: aspiration versus reality, inclusion versus erasure, universality versus plurality. Our work is to hold this tension without collapsing it into blame or dismissal, and instead to create a space where deeper truths can be named. By engaging voices from across geographies and positionalities, we can explore how to move from polarised binaries (coloniser/colonised, centre/margin, oppressor/oppressed) toward relational understanding. The ethic of decolonisation reframes these polarities not as contradictions to be erased, but as sites of learning and re-patterning. In this way, the project bridges polarities at multiple levels: • Personal and systemic – recognising how colonisation lives in bodies and behaviours as well as institutions. • Historical and contemporary – naming the long shadow of colonisation and its subtle persistence in today’s “global” initiatives. • Framework and lived reality – reimagining IDGs as tools of service that reflect diverse authorship and access, not universals imposed from above. Decolonising inner development becomes, therefore, an act of bridge-building itself: across difference, across discomfort, and across the silences that colonisation has left behind.