Decolonising implementation science: Southeast Asian perspectives

Christopher G Kemp and colleagues¹ offer seven principles for decolonising implementation science grounded in Indigenous leadership from the USA, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Australia. Writing from southeast Asia, we welcome their discussion on sovereignty, relational accountability, and community-defined evidence. However, we are compelled to raise a concern—treating one colonial configuration as a universal template risks reinstating the epistemic hierachies decolonisation seeks to dismantle.

The principles of Kemp and colleagues¹ are situated within settler colonial contexts shaped by what Wolfe² terms as the “logic of elimination” wherein colonisers replaced Indigenous populations and established permanent sovereignty over Indigenous lands. This history generated specific institutional structures such as tribal governance bodies, legally recognised sovereignty, and tribal institutional review boards that make Kemp and colleagues’ first principle of sovereignty operationalisable through formal legal mechanisms. These structures are not incidental to Kemp and colleagues’ principals—they are its preconditions.

Southeast Asia was colonised differently. British, Dutch, and French powers pursued extraction and political domination without mass settler replacement. Independence restored governance to majority autochthonous ethnic groups now governing multi-ethnic postcolonial states. Indigenous and ethnic minority communities such as Karen, Hmong, Orang Asli, and Lumad navigate marginalisation through ethnic hierarchies within postcolonial nation states, shaped by ethnic nationalism and development ideology rather than settler replacement.³ As Chakrabarty argues,⁴ European concepts, such as sovereignty and rights, function differently in non-European political formations.

The principles by Kemp and colleagues¹ also assumes liberal democratic contexts in which communities can assert rights through legal mechanisms. Across much of southeast Asia, civil society operates within constrained political environments, and community engagement occurs through negotiated relationships with state development apparatus rather than through parallel sovereign governance structures.³ Strategies premised on adversarial advocacy might not translate.

We have seen what happens when progressive global health frameworks are adopted as universal standards. Communities whose histories differ are rendered invisible and their scholars left translating rather than theorising. The principles by Kemp and colleagues¹ represent a genuine advance for the contexts from which they emerge. We offer an extending argument to the article by Tuck and Yang⁵ in which they state that “decolonisation is not a metaphor” and suggest it must also not be treated as a monolith. Different colonial histories require different decolonising praxes. A truly decolonised implementation science is not one framework that travels—however well-intentioned—but many that are rooted in their own histories, epistemologies, and political realities. Southeast Asian scholars deserve the resources, platforms, and authority to theorise from within their own knowledge systems—not to transpose principles developed for different colonial contexts but to learn from and engage with them on their own terms while developing frameworks that reflect their own realities.

1. Ong E, Cruz K, Decolonising implementation science: Southeast Asian perspectives, The Lancet Global Health, 2026; 14