Assembling an Ecosystem: The Making of State Paramos in Colombia

In Colombia in 2016, extraordinary upper mountain ecosystems known as paramos were legally delimited by the central state as strict conservation areas, based exclusively on maps produced with biophysical information. Inside their boundaries, most human activities were forbidden, although most paramos have been inhabited and used for centuries. I interrogate the making of these exclusionary state paramos using the analytic of assemblage. This framework allows me to go beyond the understanding of fields of state control as merely the product of a process of top-down authoritarian territorialisation, and make the practices of heterogeneous subjects around the production of delimited paramos visible. It also helps me investigate what happened to these subjects in the process, and contribute to a critical understanding of their roles in the establishment of conservation areas. I argue that this process had three interrelated outcomes: the state was pushed away from a liberal government of upper mountains, and towards a centralised, authoritarian scheme; scientific practices resisted state power around conservation; and some social organisations became instrumental to a simplifying grand scheme. I propose that the threat of mining extractivism in the 2010s influenced the practices of these three subjects, and catalysed the assemblage of coercively delimited paramos and their exclusion from the productive grid.

Automated summary

In Colombia, paramos were legally delimited as conservation areas in 2016, leading to the prohibition of most human activities. The author examines this exclusionary process using an assemblage framework, highlighting the roles of state power, scientific practices, and social organizations, influenced by the threat of mining extractivism.