This article1 explores the messy practice of decolonising a concept through collaborative work between scholars researching together the meaning of everyday humanitarianism in Tanzania. Humanitarianism is typically understood as the state-centric, formal, Northern-driven helping of distant others in crisis. Using the concept of everyday humanitarianism, our article challenges these assumptions in three ways. First, it explores the everyday humanitarian actions of ordinary citizens in times of crisis. Second, it explores these responses in a Southern context. Third, it focuses explicitly on the givers and not only the receivers of humanitarian help. Our work grounds decolonisation in the actual practices of research aimed at theory building as an iterative back-and-forth exchange with particular attention to power, rather than as a transplant of Northern theory on the South, or its opposite. Our first argument is that the objective of collaborative research to capture the local politics of giving and then use these practices to interrogate the theoretical concept of everyday humanitarianism can be decolonising. Second, we argue that the practices of the academic labour that produces knowledge or inductive theory can also be decolonising. Understanding both the challenges and the possibilities of decolonising ‘humanitarianism’ will provide an opportunity to document and thus legitimate the complexity that is inherent in decolonising a discipline.

Climate change both reflects and transforms global development. Asymmetries of responsibility, impact and capacity reflect historical and current development hierarchies. At the same time, the imperative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions perversely empowers high-emitting newly industrialising counties. As inter-state negotiations enter a new post-Kyoto paradigm involving emissions reductions for ‘all Parties’ to the UN climate change convention, relations between industrial and industrialising countries, and more broadly between North and South, are re-orientated. This article charts these relations through two decades of United Nations climate negotiations, arguing the need to secure emissions reductions across the industrialising world opens up new possibilities for climate justice.

Crisis has played a significant role in international environmental law since its inception. To some extent the field as a whole might be characterized as a ‘discipline of crisis’, since it functions as a counterbalance to unbridled pollution and resource depletion. On the other hand, there have been ongoing attempts to move away from a reactive focus on crisis and to conceptualize international environmental law as part of a broader societal shift toward sustainability. The dilemma that faces the discipline is that in the absence of a sense of crisis, we are unsure of how to generate the commitment that will be required to undertake fundamental changes to the status quo.

Nous présentons un modèle « prospectif » avec deux économies. Le Nord a stabilisé son stock de gaz à effet de serre, alors que le Sud continue d'émettre des polluants sans moyen de lutter contre. Ces externalités ont un impact sur la production du Sud et sont source de désutilité au Nord. On montre alors que le Nord est conduit à les internaliser en investissant dans le patrimoine écologique du Sud. Ceci lui permet de converger vers un état stationnaire sur un sentier de croissance équilibrée le long duquel on vérifie un critère de soutenabilité, alors que ces « investissements verts » s'avèrent insuffisants pour que le Sud connaisse une telle issue.