The conversation on sustainability often overlooks its colonial roots. The same systems that exploit land and labor also shape the cultural industries we inhabit. Decolonizing Sustainability in Music and Culture calls for a radical shift — from greenwashing to genuine justice. Drawing from a life journey that spans Bogotá, the U.S. Midwest, New York City, and Berlin’s underground scenes, this essay explores how decolonial principles can transform the way we create, collaborate, and care in music and culture.
I was born in Bogotá in the mid-1970s — into a country vibrating with rhythm and contradiction. Colombia in the 1980s and 90s was a place of dazzling creativity shadowed by violence: a society torn apart by drug cartels, paramilitaries, guerrillas, and corrupt right-wing governments, all fighting over power, land, and survival. Behind the headlines, ordinary people carried on with extraordinary resilience. We learned to dance amid chaos and violence, to laugh amid fear, to create beauty in a landscape scarred by inequality. I grew up in a country with a culture and society steeped in contrasts, in abundance!
Looking back, I came to understand that the Colombia of my youth was not simply “violent” — it remained colonized, still haunted by centuries of dispossession. The instability and corruption that defined my upbringing were not accidents of geography; they were the modern faces of an old system built on extraction — of land, labor, and culture.
Displacement and Awakening
When I left Bogotá to finish high school in the American Midwest, I experienced another kind of dissonance. The order, abundance, and stability around me were impressive, but they came with a silence — a silence about where that wealth came from, and whose stories had been erased to build it. Later on, studying at the university in Münster, Germany, and consequently working for a multinational company, I began to recognize the same logic of extraction that had shaped Colombia: efficiency over empathy, profit over purpose, growth over balance.
Years later, I had the privilege to study a postgraduate Master of Arts in Music Business at New York University (NYU) — right at the epicenter of the global music industry, where the myths, structures, and mechanisms of modern cultural production are both made and perpetuated. Living and studying there, I could observe firsthand how the industry operates: how culture becomes commodity, how innovation is monetized, and how narratives of success are deeply tied to systems of privilege. This experience sharpened my understanding of how deeply colonial power dynamics still shape the global flow of music, capital, and visibility — even under the banner of diversity or creativity.
All in all, Berlin changed everything. The city’s cracks — its countercultures, its political art, its immigrant rhythms — became my teachers. I joined JuanImashi, a Latin-alternative band, co-founded the Salón de Baile floor at Fusion Festival, and began organizing concerts and tours that celebrated the diversity of our diasporic sounds. These projects weren’t just musical; they were existential. Through Pachamama Culture and later Music C•A•R•E•S, I’ve been searching for something deeper — a way of finding my own identity, reconnecting sustainability with music, justice, and art with ancestry.
The Colonial Roots of the Climate and Cultural Crises
The climate crisis is not a neutral event. It does not affect everyone equally. Its most devastating impacts fall on communities destabilized by centuries of colonization, extractivism, and systemic inequality — the very people who have contributed least to the crisis. This is not a coincidence; it is a continuation of history.
Colonialism was never only about conquest or the theft of resources. It was also about the colonization of meaning — deciding whose knowledge counts, whose music is “art,” and whose is “folklore.” European frameworks were elevated as universal, while Indigenous, African, and non-Western worldviews were silenced, marginalized, or appropriated. These hierarchies persist today in the global music industry, where innovation is often defined through Eurocentric standards, and where “world music” still functions as a euphemism for everything outside the West.
Even in sustainability work, colonial logics reappear under a new disguise. “Green” initiatives in culture can become performative gestures — reducing emissions without redistributing power, cleaning up festivals without confronting the structural inequities that underpin the entire system. Without decolonization, sustainability risks becoming another form of greenwashing.
From Critique to Praxis
To decolonize sustainability in music is to move from critique to action — from awareness to transformation. It means embedding justice, reciprocity, and plurality into every layer of our cultural work. Within Music C•A•R•E•S, this takes the shape of several guiding principles — a living framework for practice rather than theory.
1. Fair Resource Redistribution
Sustainability begins with equity. We must shift funding, visibility, and infrastructure toward artists and cultural workers from the Global South and marginalized diasporas. This includes equitable payment structures that acknowledge centuries of unpaid cultural labor — from Afro-Colombian drummers to Indigenous song carriers whose traditions have been sampled without credit.
2. Centering Indigenous and Local Knowledge
Indigenous and non-Western knowledge systems are not relics of the past; they are living blueprints for sustainable futures. Decolonial practice means creating space for these voices to define the terms of engagement — not to be curated or translated into Western categories, but to stand on their own authority. Respecting natural principles of evolution and transformation.
3. Resisting Cultural Extractivism
Cultural extraction mirrors environmental extraction. When the industry mines traditions for sounds or aesthetics without consent or reciprocity, it reproduces colonial violence. Our collaborations must be rooted in co-creation, not consumption — in relationship, not replication.
4. Pluriversality Over Universality
There is no single model of sustainability, just as there is no single rhythm that defines humanity. Decolonial sustainability embraces pluriversality — the coexistence of multiple worlds and ways of knowing. Biodiversity! Music becomes a bridge between cosmologies, not a hierarchy of them.
5. Intersectional Solidarity
Colonialism intersects with racism, patriarchy, capitalism, and ableism. Building sustainable cultural ecosystems requires alliances across movements — climate justice, Indigenous sovereignty, gender equality, labor rights. We must learn to hear the harmony in our shared struggles.
6. Accountability and Reflexivity
Decolonization is a process, not a brand. It demands constant reflection: Who benefits from our projects? Who is represented, and who is missing? Within Music C•A•R•E•S, we aim to create accountability structures led by those most affected by colonial and climate injustices.
7. Sustainable Cultural Practices Beyond the Stage
Reducing emissions or banning plastic cups is important, but it’s not enough. Sustainability must also reshape how we tour, how we build festivals, how we relate to the communities that host us. The ethics of care, reciprocity, and respect must extend beyond the stage — into the relationships that sustain our art.
Decolonizing Sustainability Is Not an Add-On — It’s the Foundation
As someone who grew up amid Colombia’s contradictions, studied at the heart of the global music industry in New York, and now works in Europe’s cultural sector, I’ve learned that sustainability without decolonization is an illusion. The same systems that exploit the Earth also exploit culture. The same extractivism that destroys ecosystems feeds the machinery of the global entertainment industry.
Decolonizing sustainability in music means recognizing that every rhythm carries history, every collaboration carries responsibility. It means weaving justice into the fabric of creation — not as a marketing strategy, but as a moral compass.
Only by dismantling colonial hierarchies — within ourselves, our institutions, and our imaginaries — can we build truly sustainable cultural futures.
That is the promise of Music C•A•R•E•S: to turn sustainability from a methodological and technical measure into a collective act of healing. To make music not just sound beautiful, but be just. Making music not only beautiful, but also just. It’s an ongoing process, a transformation of consciousness, a constant search for identity.
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About the Author
Mauricio Lizarazo Prada is a Berlin-based Colombian/German live music producer, cultural entrepreneur, and activist. Founder of Pachamama Culture and the sustainability platform Music C•A•R•E•S, he has worked for over two decades in the live music industry, building bridges between culture, sustainability, with climate and socioeconomic justice at the forefront. He holds a Bachelor in Science in Business Administration and a Master of Arts in Music Business from New York University (NYU) and is dedicated to decolonizing cultural production while amplifying voices from the Global South through transformative, sustainable practices.
article posted by:Mauricio Lizarazo Prada, Pachamama Culture • Music C•A•R•E•S