Abstract
The Colombian government’s proposal for the Tribugá Port project puts in evidence the juxtaposition of dominant approaches to development and place-based well-being strategies of local communities. The extension of the national maritime infrastructure network follows mainstream development narratives centered around the spatial reorganization and expansion of capitalism to cater to the needs of industrial and commercial accumulation. Ethno-development plans and interviews indicate that local well-being initiatives rooted in local livelihoods, identity, culture, and environmental conservation form the basis for resisting the Tribugá Port project. Such well-being perspectives not only provide a different understanding of development but also are likely to lead to a different outcome because they foster inclusive and sustainable processes and a sense of solidarity, self-determination, and self-management of resources.
La propuesta del gobierno colombiano para el proyecto del Puerto de Tribugá pone en evidencia la yuxtaposición de enfoques dominantes para el desarrollo y las estrategias de bienestar implementadas en los sitios de comunidades locales. La extensión de la red nacional de infraestructura marítima sigue las narrativas principales de desarrollo centradas en la reorganización espacial y la expansión del capitalismo para satisfacer las necesidades de la acumulación industrial y comercial. Los planes de etnodesarrollo y las entrevistas indican que las iniciativas locales de bienestar arraigadas en medios de vida locales, la identidad, la cultura y la conservación del medio ambiente forman la base para resistir el proyecto del Puerto de Tribugá. Tales perspectivas de bienestar no solo proporcionan una comprensión diferente del desarrollo, sino que también es probable que conduzcan a un resultado diferente porque fomentan procesos inclusivos y sustentables, así como un sentido de solidaridad, autodeterminación y autogestión de los recursos.
Driven by increased foreign capital inflows during the 2000–2014 commodities price boom and following overall global economic recovery, Latin American countries witnessed a massive surge of infrastructure investments. In pursuit of high returns and in the hope of creating backward-and-forward linkages to other sectors in national economies, private and public actors scaled up their efforts in physical infrastructure investments, including in infrastructure related to maritime transportation. From the perspective of policy makers, such investments will lead to prosperity and development. Infrastructure geographically embedded in marginalized territories is seen as a panacea for achieving development. However, such mainstream approaches to understanding development not only underpin what some call the “white gaze” of development (Pailey, 2020), reinforcing a racialized understanding of modernity, but also fundamentally ignore Global South perspectives that provide alternatives to the Global North’s hegemonic views on development. 1
Well-being perspectives and long-term planning processes rooted in local livelihoods, identity, culture, organizational processes, and environmental stewardship can help to conceptualize a radically different understanding of development and alternatives to it. This article aims to contribute to wider discussions related to the tensions between well-being and development in the context of the incommensurability among global, national, and local marine and coastal development policies and planning processes.
To explore these tensions and to conceptually expand on alternatives to mainstream views on development, in July 2018 we met with the Consejo Comunitario Los Riscales (Los Riscales Community Council—LRCC), the traditional authority of the Afro-Colombian population in the coastal municipality of Nuquí, Chocó Department, Colombia. Together with LRCC representatives, we discussed a collaborative research project about local livelihoods and regional planning processes in the context of development and well-being perspectives. One of the outcomes of this meeting was a request from the LRCC to convene local, regional, and national actors to discuss the Colombian government’s plans for the Tribugá Port infrastructure project.
Using arguments from heterodox political economy, critical economic geography, and the postdevelopment literature and visualizing the development and well-being perspectives coexisting in Nuquí, we contrast the dominant narrative underlying the proposed Tribugá Port project with local well-being perceptions. We argue that the Tribugá Port is part of a strategy to expand the national maritime infrastructure network into the northern Colombian Pacific that ignores structural needs and visions of well-being of local communities. The deepening of Colombia’s neoliberal growth model, driving accumulation strategies by means of land dispossession and ocean grabbing, reinforces existing inequalities, which threaten not only Afro-Colombian and indigenous peoples’ traditional territories but also the access to marine and coastal resources on which their livelihoods depend.
The first section provides the conceptual and theoretical context. The second section summarizes the methodological approach. The third section provides a brief context of Nuquí and the Chocó Department. The fourth section presents findings on dominant and local developments and well-being perspectives, which are then discussed in the following section. A final section concludes.
Infrastructure from Development and Well-being Perspectives
During the 2000s commodity boom and following the overall fiscal recovery after the 2007–2008 global financial crisis, there has been a resurgent interest in infrastructure in the mainstream development discourse in many Latin American countries (Carranza, Daude, and Melguizo, 2014). Drawing on findings that infrastructure investments have positive effects through increased market access, the reduction of trade costs, and positive agglomeration and employment effects (Breinlich et al., 2013; Redding and Turner, 2015), the mainstream economics literature argues that an increase in infrastructure investments is positively correlated with development and poverty reduction in Latin America (Calderón and Servén, 2014; Easterly and Servén, 2003).
Most of these arguments are based on neoclassical theories and endogenous growth models (see Barro, 1990; Futagami, Morita, and Shibata, 1993), which allege that infrastructure investments have positive effects on long-term growth rates (Minerva and Ottaviano, 2007). Calderón and Servén (2014: 2) highlight the importance of infrastructure for Latin America, arguing that it “facilitates the poor’s access to productive opportunities [by] raising the value of their assets.” Infrastructure developments have a direct effect on increasing income levels and reducing inequality and poverty (Calderón and Servén, 2014).
Conversely, arguments from critical economic geographers and heterodox political economists emphasize that the emphasis on infrastructure furthers uneven power relations (see Brenner, 2003; Franz, 2019; MacKinnon et al., 2009; Ougaard, 2018; Pike et al., 2009; Smith, 2008). Harvey (2004) points out that the concentration of wealth and power through land and wealth dispossession processes is driven by state actors who privatize natural resources such as land and water. Investments in physical infrastructure play a key role in this geographical expansion and spatial reorganization of capitalism (Franz, 2020). Everything from roads, railways, ports, and industrial free-trade zones to communication systems functions as a means to achieve temporal and spatial fixes for capital, which serve as a basis for future capital accumulation at the expense of workers and the environment (Jessop, 2008).
In Latin America, and specifically in Colombia, the search for new spaces that absorb surplus capital by infrastructure investments has led to land and ocean grabs by domestic and transnational elite groups. Aside from land grabbing that mainly serves the purpose of advancing neoliberal growth models based on extractive accumulation and industrial agriculture, ocean grabbing has emerged as a concept to explain processes of enclosure of ocean and coastal spaces and resources (Bennett et al., 2015). Capitalism’s constant expansion into new territories has led to the inclusion of coastal and ocean spaces and resources into capitalist forms of production and reproduction (see Arrighi, 2009).
The extension of maritime transportation networks plays a crucial role in this. Already noted by Marx and Engels (1970: 74) in The German Ideology, “Manufacture and the movement of production in general received an enormous impetus through the extension of commerce which came with the discovery of America and the sea-route to the East Indies.” Circulation by movement of production and commerce is central to capitalism’s efforts to expand beyond spatial barriers. As Marx (1973: 539) reflects in the Grundrisse, the creation of infrastructure defined as “the physical conditions of exchange” is a necessary function of capitalism in furthering “the annihilation of space by time.”
The historical dynamics of capitalism to enclose and appropriate territories are playing out in the increasing commercialization of oceans. What is known as the “Blue Economy” has driven capitalist expansion into oceanic and coastal territories (see Benjaminsen and Bryceson, 2012; Choi, 2017). Ocean grabs and subsequent reconfiguration of social relations have deepened uneven geographical development and exacerbated social, economic, and environmental inequalities around access to and use of coastal resources (Mallin and Barbesgaard, 2020).
Neoliberal marine spatial planning processes that exclude resource users from coastal spaces and traditional territories that are key for harvesting activities and other cultural practices have contributed to capitalist expansion and to increasing inequalities in Colombia (see Idrobo, Davidson-Hung, and Seixas, 2016). For states and multinational corporations, the increased infrastructural power resulting from the enclosure of coastal spaces associated with the construction of maritime infrastructure allows for the expansion of capitalist markets through the extraction, circulation, and accumulation of capital closely linked to oceanic activities (Vega et al., 2019; Acevedo Guerrero, 2020; Narchi, 2019).
When such infrastructure projects are built on indigenous, Afro-Colombian, and peasants’ territories, they frequently circumvent collective titles or property rights. The exclusionary character of these developments advances neoliberal accumulation strategies of local, national, and transnational elites and exacerbates existing inequalities due to the uneven access to rents generated by infrastructure projects (see Franz, 2018; 2017; Mauro, 2009).
The changes in resource allocation regimes that accompany infrastructure developments lead to de-facto privatization of common-pool resources (Pinkerton, 2017). Resource use regime shifts become another means of reallocation when resource use produces transitions from subsistence to market-based commodities (Berkes, 2010). In the case of ocean grabbing, such changes not only dispossess coastal peoples, threatening their livelihoods and the continuity of their ways of life, but often lead to the destruction of the ecosystems on which they rely (Bavinck et al., 2017; Franco et al., 2014). As a part of the neoliberal development strategy in the Americas, maritime infrastructure investments accelerate ocean grabbing processes by reallocating coastal spaces that are part of ancestral territories of indigenous and traditional peoples, some of which are still occupied by them. In the case of the Colombian Pacific, coastal lands are the ancestral territories of Afro-Colombian and Embera peoples (Ng’weno, 2000).
Postdevelopment theory complements the aforementioned arguments by highlighting the need to focus on how local communities conceptualize their short- and long-term well-being. Afro-descendent, indigenous, peasant, feminist, and social movements’ epistemologies, practices, and goals underpin a postdevelopment theory grounded in an understanding of how marginalized social actors struggle to gain access to and plan the territories in which they live. In essence, postdevelopment theory criticizes the goals and core principles of development, such as economic growth, progress, modernization, rationalization, and individualism (Escobar, 2005; Gudynas, 2011).
Postdevelopment thinking acknowledges that development strategies follow a universal model of society, ignoring the existence of alternatives to development, the context-specific realities of the regions in which growth strategies have been implemented, and the uneven geopolitical power relationships between the Global North and the Global South (see Escobar, 2005; Halvorsen, 2018; Smith, 2008). Furthermore, the dominant development perspectives marginalize the contributions of “feminized subjects” to well-being, the economy, and society (Aguinaga, Lang, and Mokrani et al., 2011; Pérez Orozco, 2014; Zaragocin, 2019). Therefore, especially in the Colombian Pacific, Afro-Colombians, indigenous peoples, and peasants have been disproportionately and negatively affected by national, regional, and local policy processes (Asher and Ojeda, 2009; Rincón-Ruiz and Kallis, 2013).
Escobar (2011) argues that alternatives to development in which people and community well-being become decoupled from economic growth are found in some indigenous and Afro-descendent communities and social movements in the Global South. Buen vivir (living well) among the Quechua (Gudynas, 2011; Radcliffe, 2012) and vivir sabroso (joyful living) among some Afro-Colombians (Quiceno, 2017) are examples of well-being perspectives in response to tensions with competing conceptions of development and their effects on traditional peoples and their ancestral territories (see Artaraz and Calestani, 2015). Well-being is rooted in peoples’ culture and identity and their relations with territories and social groups, transcending what dominant approaches call “quality of life” (Coulthard, Derek, and McGregor, 2011). These framings include self-determination, collective rights to territory, and the rights of nature (Radcliffe, 2012).
Dominant development narratives often portray Afro-Colombians as poor and requiring infrastructural interventions to escape poverty and achieve “development.” This short-term view displaces people from the center of analysis and obliterates their well-being perspectives (Nixon, 2011: 151).
Methods
This paper draws on a qualitative, transdisciplinary, and participatory-action research project conducted in collaboration with the LRCC in Nuquí. During six trips to Nuquí (between July 2018 and August 2019), we conducted semistructured interviews (Creswell, 2014; Bernard, 2006) and ran focus groups (Morgan, 1998) with community members, local government officials, and other key stakeholders. We also participated in community meetings and agriculture, fishing, and tourism activities in the rural settlements north and south of Nuquí’s urban center.
The results include an analysis of the LRCC’s ethno-development plan, the Colombian government’s National Development Plan 2018–2022, and the National Investment Plan 2018–2022, as well as documents from the Colombian Commission of the Oceans (Comisión Colombiana del Oceáno, 2020), media articles, and 42 interviews. Additionally, we include information from two public forums (in Nuquí in November 2018 and in Bogotá in May 2019) where community members and authorities, government representatives, and investors presented their views on the Tribugá Port project. We employed basic qualitative data coding and analysis protocols (e.g., Auerbach and Silverstein 2003) to manually code the reviewed documents and the interviews and public forum transcriptions. These main categories were, in turn, unpacked according to their relation to local economic development, livelihoods, identity, culture, and environmental conservation. The research was conducted in accordance with an ethics protocol approved by the Universidad de los Andes Research Ethics Board. Respondents were anonymized in order to protect their privacy and are identified as “Nuquí residents.”
Contextualizing Nuquí and Chocó
The Nuquí municipality, located in the Department of Chocó, northwestern Colombia, has a population of about 9,000 and is accessible only by air or sea. With roughly half of its population living in rural areas along the Pacific Coast, local livelihoods rely on small-scale agriculture and fishing (41.09 percent) and tourism service provision, often related to community-based ecotourism projects (51.95 percent) (DANE, 2020a).
Situated in the Chocó, Nuquí’s situation is similar to that of the entire department. Historically abandoned by the central government, Chocó’s poverty rate of 60 percent is double the Colombian average. Chocó also has the highest rates of unemployment, malnutrition, infant mortality, and illiteracy in the country (Gobernación del Chocó, 2016). Public services are structurally underfunded, leaving many without access to drinking water, electricity, education, and health care. According to the Regional Government, “73 percent of the municipalities do not have any type of drinking water treatment system and in the remaining 27 percent disinfection is carried out not at all or inadequately” (Gobernación del Chocó, 2016: 63). Caught between Colombia’s neoliberal development strategy, which deprives them of access to basic sanitary, health, and educational services, and structural oppression during the 68 years of armed conflict, Nuquí has been particularly subjected to violence and poverty. It is thus unsurprising that 72.9 percent of the population lives in multidimensional poverty, lacking aqueducts and sewage systems, electricity, and basic health care (DANE, 2020b).
Despite this historic abandonment, the Colombian government proposed massive investments in the form of the Tribugá Port project. 2 The proposed Tribugá Port would be located 9 kilometers north of Nuquí’s urban center and 15 kilometers south of the Utría National Park, occupying an area of over 500 hectares in the Tribugá Gulf. With the proposed construction of several docks that extend 3.6 kilometers into the ocean in order to reach a docking depth of up to 20 meters, the Tribugá Port is set to receive large container ships (i.e., Neo-Panamax vessels) to reach a total capacity of 3.2 million tons per year (CCM, 2017).The political economic contention between the mainstream narrative around the Tribugá Port and the regimes of territoriality and well-being prevalent in Nuquí play out in the daily lives of the local Afro-Colombian community.
From Dominant Development Narratives to Local Well-being Alternatives
The construction of the port has generally received a mixed reaction by the local population. Our research, however, mainly focuses on the territorial vision of the traditional authority (the LRCC) and the articulation of its proposals, which are rooted in alternative ideas for achieving development and well-being. Our findings emphasize the LRCC’s organizational perspective, which fully opposes the construction of the port. However, we have also identified standpoints within the local population that favor the development of the port. Of the 42 people we interviewed, 3 agreed with the construction of the port, 37 did not agree, and 2 indicated that they needed more information.
“Nuquí Needs a Port”
Since the early 2000s, the Colombian state has implemented several reforms to enable the privatization and deregulation of land and water as a means to incentivize infrastructure investments (e.g., Law 1508 [2012]; Law 1682 [2013]). This has facilitated private investments in infrastructure, which increased from around 1 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in 2010 to over 4 percent in 2018 (see Rodríguez Porcel et al., 2018). Besides the increased efforts for private participation, public investment in infrastructure increased fivefold between 2010 and 2018, to US$26 million (US$22 million in road construction, US$2 million in ports, US$1.6 million in airport renovations, and US$300,000 in railway construction) (DNP, 2018a). The growth of public investment in infrastructure from 1.6 percent of GDP in 2010 to almost 3 percent in 2018 (CCI, 2018) made Colombia the third-largest Latin American spender on infrastructure development (Serebrisky et al., 2018). Policy changes have gone hand in hand with the transition to peace in Colombia. Peace and infrastructure are seen as tied to development and progress (Gómez, 2016).
With the election of President Iván Duque in 2018, this perspective manifested itself in the administration’s National Investment Plan (DNP, 2018b) and the National Policy on Ocean and Coastal Spaces (CCO, 2018). The plans have primarily been focused on the development of the Chocó, emphasizing the need to fund infrastructure projects in the department, particularly in Nuquí municipality. However, rather than expanding public investments in much-needed health and education services, the plan focuses on transportation infrastructure projects such as the Tribugá Port and a railroad and a highway to connect the Pacific Coast to the rest of the country (DNP, 2018b).
The National Development Plan stresses the importance of infrastructure development to “reach the full development of our (country’s) potential” (DNP, 2018c: 573). This emphasis on “an infrastructure network that . . . will have the greatest impact for the national economy” (DNP, 2018: 600) is particularly centered on the improvement of existing and the construction of new ports (see CCI, 2018).
The Tribugá Port is the Plan’s most ambitious project. The port’s building and management are the responsibilities of the private-public organization called Sociedad Arquímedes. Arquímedes is made up of the department governments of Chocó, Caldas and Risaralda, department and municipality-level Chambers of Commerce (Caldas, Chocó, Risaralda, Cartago), a private university (Universidad Autónoma de Manizales), two public polytechnic universities (Chocó and Pereira), and other enterprises and economic actors from Colombia’s landlocked coffee-growing region (Arquímedes, 2018). The Chinese port-building company China Harbour Engineering Company Ltd. and unnamed U.S. investors are the main foreign multinational corporations involved. The aim of Arquímedes is not just the building of Colombia’s second major port on the Pacific Coast and a rail and highway connection but also the establishment of a free-trade zone with an extensive industrial park (Arquímedes, 2018). Once the port, the railway, and the industrial park are built, Arquímedes will also oversee their operation. Infrastructure projects like this one can cause access problems for the local population at the same time as privatizing profits from common-pool resources.
The discourse of public officials and the Colombian elite focuses on the potential benefits the Tribugá Port project would bring for the region and the entire country. For example, the national and regional governments as well as Arquímedes and investors promise a more productive economy and employment creation. From their point of view, the project would “benefit and impact the way of life of the inhabitants of the department of Chocó . . . and the inhabitants of the so-called Golden Triangle between the cities of Bogotá, Medellín, and Cali” (CCM, 2017: 12).
Personifying the interests of Colombian elites, the general manager of Arquímedes, William Naranjo also emphasized that “this project can really trigger positive social and economic changes for the Chocó region. For example, job opportunities created through the establishment of the free-trade zone will help Chocoanos find employment . . . and within the context of increasing competitiveness, it not only favors Chocó, it favors all of Colombia, it favors all entrepreneurs, producers, farmers, and those engaged in primary activities” (Semana, 2019),
The argument that the Tribugá Port project would help to overcome the historical and structural marginalization of the Chocó department and its inhabitants is also embraced by the Chamber of Commerce of the Chocó: “a deep-water port in the Chocoano Pacific . . . would increase [Chocó’s] international trade, directly generate employment, improve its competitiveness and, above all, boost the socio-economic development of the department of Chocó” (Cámara de Comercio del Chocó, 2019).
The government estimates that the construction of the Tribugá Port would reduce freight transportation cost by up to 90 percent and thus achieve international competitiveness (Arquímedes, 2018). However, with existing ports in Colombia running at 40.7 percent of their capacity (Hommes, 2019), the arguments for increase in competitiveness and trade capacity seems far-fetched. House of Representatives member Catalina Ortíz pointed this out during a public forum in the Senate in 2019: “With the high unemployment in Buenaventura 3 and the port running below 50 percent of its capacity, it doesn’t make sense to invest in the construction of a new port that would destroy much of the rain forest of the Chocó.”
The arguments that the construction of the Tribugá Port would bring employment opportunities, decrease transportation costs, increase access to markets, and facilitate the provision of goods and services were also emphasized by Nuquí residents who were in favor of the project. One resident stressed that the lack of formal employment opportunities could be overcome with the construction of the port, which “would mean that things would get better here” (Nuquí Resident 1, interview, March 2019). The lack of access to water and electricity was of particular importance for some interviewees. One argued that the project would “bring better access to electricity . . . schools, aqueducts for potable water, and hospitals . . . and we would not have to run to [he department’s capital] Quibdó when we’re sick; there would be ambulances” (Nuquí Resident 1, interview, August 2019).
Another resident of Nuquí pointed out that “gasoline here costs double or triple that in the rest of the country because it is difficult to bring here. So, I think that with a port and the road, gasoline will get cheaper and that will be beneficial to us” (Nuquí Resident 2, interview, August 2019). From their perspective, facilitated access to better cold storage for the local fishery, decreased transportation costs of local products, and a decrease in costs of intermediate goods would make local farmers and fishers more efficient and enhance competitiveness. Others expressed the opinion that the project “would benefit [the community] because more [tourists] would arrive here and that creates more commerce, more work, more jobs” (Nuquí Resident 3, interview, March 2019).
Some interviewees expressed a sense of bitterness toward the status quo born of historical and structural abandonment. In many cases this attitude informed residents’ view about the Tribugá Port project and lent itself to a coerced position about the construction of the port: “They have abandoned us, supremely abandoned, so we see that having a port here could bring development” (Nuquí Resident 2, interview, March 2019).
“Nuquí Doesn’t Need a Port”
The 37 residents who feel that a port will not benefit them have continuously contributed to the LRCC’s efforts to imagining and enacting their own vision of well-being.
Despite its precarious living conditions, the Afro-Colombian population of Nuquí has also been at the forefront of the building of alternatives to the dominant discourse on economic development through ethno-development plans. Many stressed that development in their territory needs to resonate with their own well-being perspectives and be part of a long-term planning process. In everyday life, well-being means “living peacefully,” which underlies an ethic of care for oneself and the social-ecological environment. This is translated into long-term processes aimed at creating and implementing autonomous, sustainable land use and coastal planning and achieving healthy local economies operating beyond market-based economies.
In this vein, a local resident leading the promotion of a community-based vision of development that centers around Afro-Colombian and ancestral understanding of land and property stated: “We have a vision of development based on what the land provides to us. This is different from the highlands and main cities of the country. We, the ancestral people who have lived in and with the territory for centuries, see our wealth in what the water, the forest, and the land provide to us” (Nuquí Resident 4, interview, March 2019).
Nuquí’s livelihoods are based on small-scale fishing and agriculture, and more recently community-based ecotourism, all key aspects of the community’s source of income, identity, culture, and environmental ethic. Traditional institutions related to sharing fish catches and land-based food production have developed around building and strengthening family and community relations while providing access to important food items to those temporarily in need. Most people identify themselves as fishers and are involved in some stage of the fish industry (i.e., capture, transformation, storage, transportation, and exchange). Having intimate knowledge of the marine and coastal environments and their resources, including culinary and gastronomic knowledge, is a source of pride (Nuquí Resident 5, interview, August 2019): Fishing is something I like. I like being in the water in a skiff, to have the sea by my side, to be able to work with it, to feel that I belong to this habitat. Being able to navigate at night without lights, to go wherever I want, to understand the moon, to comprehend how much fish I am going to catch is part of who I am.
Fishing activities are intertwined with an environmental stewardship ethic based on respecting the environment and ensuring the continuity of local livelihoods. Long-term efforts from local fishers to institutionalize the conservation of fish stocks and local livelihoods led to the establishment of a 60,138-hectare marine protected area (MPA) (i.e., Golfo de Tribugá–Cabo Corrientes Integrated Regional Management District). The goal of this MPA, in which the proposed Tribugá Port will be built, is to regulate the access of industrial shrimp trawlers to coastal waters and ensure that local small-scale fishers employ gear that does not destroy the local ecosystems and the resource base on which they rely (Velandia and Díaz, 2016).
Nuquí is a renowned tourism destination in Colombia because of the aesthetic value of its well-conserved ecosystems and whale watching activities. This has enabled the emergence of community-based tourism, which has strengthened the local economy and in turn stimulated other productive sectors, such as fishing and agriculture.
These local economic activities—tourism, agriculture, and fishing— are based on cooperation and reciprocity (Nuquí Resident 6, interview, August 2019): We have always said that we do community tourism. For example, tourists arrive, and they stay with me. I do not only benefit myself. Many people benefit since I buy the coconut from one person, the other one does the guiding; one person helps me in the kitchen, another with the cleaning. So many people benefit. I believe that in this way the quality of life is greatly improved.
The increased noise pollution and the destruction of the mangrove ecosystem associated with the Tribugá Port threatens community ecotourism based on whale watching and will have a devastating effect on coastal small-scale fishers. In contrast, LRCC’s ethno-development plan calls for economic practices and territorial planning for the protection of life, territory, and culture. “In black people’s worldview, territory is linked to everyday tasks. In the network of the divine and the human, plants, animals, water, elves, ghosts, and spirits are cornerstones and influence the relations of respect, use, and organization and distribution of resources within each community” (Los Riscales Community Council, 2007).
A significant proportion of Afro-Colombians in Nuquí embrace the above-mentioned worldview and do not equate their well-being with the dominant notion of progress. They do not understand poverty in the same way the Colombian government does. Well-being for them transcends the acquisition, possession, and accumulation of capital and material goods. Rather, it is associated with the satisfaction of basic needs and rights, living in peace, and a enjoying a healthy environment (Nuquí Resident 7, interview, March 2019): To live well is not to have money. . . . To live well is to have what one needs. At least I have my boat, my motor, my fishing equipment. . . . That I have what I need in my house . . . I do not dream of having money. . . . I dream of having a normal life and do not need anything else.
During fieldwork, we observed the existence of relational subjects rather than individualistic liberal subjects basing their actions on maximizing their income. The success and well-being of one person depends on healthy relations with others, the environment, and the territory. This perspective is a fundamental part of Afro-Colombian communitarian worldviews that form their vision of well-being (see Escobar, 2008; Quiceno, 2017) and contradict the dominant anthropocentric worldview. People are seen as entities intimately linked with nature that recognize themselves as just one element in the universe and not as the central one. From this perspective, historically and currently diverse Afro-Colombian communities struggle for cultural and territorial autonomy, which includes the conservation of the ecosystems they inhabit and on which they depend. Fishing, agriculture, and tourism are essential to food sovereignty and to a politics of relationality within the territory and constitute the base of a community economy rooted in traditional practices. A community-oriented economy contributes to people’s well-being because it not only generates monetary income to individual households but also feeds the community and enables the fulfillment of individual and community planning aspirations.
The LRCC’s ethno-development plan has a specific focus on strengthening the community’s ability to resist exploitation and oppression and to be in charge of the political, economic, social, and environmental changes affecting its well-being. “Our ethno-development plan proposes a logic for subsistence and not for exploitation. We want that the same level of supply of natural resources we have had as a community will continue for future generations. For that reason, we defined some rules for fishing. Our well-being is associated with a healthy relation between the ecosystem and the communities” (LRCC representative, interview, August 2019).
Small-scale fishing and agriculture and community ecotourism in Nuquí’s everyday life give people a sense of peace and tranquility that they fear could be disrupted with the Tribugá Port project. People are aware not only that they risk losing the dimensions of their lives but also that they will not be the main beneficiaries of the economic progress that the port may bring.
Many in Nuquí are afraid that the Tribugá Port project epitomizes dominant imaginaries of development and progress. Its construction would severely affect Afro-Colombian and indigenous well-being, including traditional practices. As one community member stated, “The project would seriously threaten our ways of living and the livelihoods we get from fishing, agriculture, and community-based tourism” (Nuquí Resident 8, interview, August 2019).
Discussion
From our research, we found that the imaginaries and practices of the LRCC in Nuquí are much closer to postdevelopment and well-being reflections than to the dominant development visions. Our findings highlight the LRCC’s ethno-development plan, organized on the basis of Afro-descendants’ ideas of living well, which provides context-specific alternatives to development. In that sense, the LRCC’s plan is one of many possible expressions of imaginaries and practices rooted in a specific vision of well-being in Nuquí.
As Uribe (2018: 900) has pointed out, infrastructural power is either “securing territorial sovereignty or allowing the expansion of governmental control and capitalism over spaces and populations considered ‘marginal,’ ‘backward,’ or ‘lawless.’” In this article, we have argued that the Tribugá Port project is largely driven by interests of domestic and transnational capital, since it creates opportunities to geographically and temporally reallocate capitalist surpluses for future accumulation (see Harvey, 2004; Arrighi, 2009; Franz, 2020). The resulting enclosure of marine and coastal spaces and the expansion of a neoliberal accumulation regime into Nuquí threatens access of the local population to coastal resources and reinforces existing inequalities.
The Tribugá Port is tightly interwoven with the historic development of the Nuquí municipality. Building a second major port on the Pacific Coast has been a flagship infrastructural project for the Colombian elite, reducing Nuquí’s raison d’être to providing a vector to accelerate the integration of the Colombian Pacific into global capitalism. While government plans for local development in the Chocó mainly emphasize the need for development through scaling up public and private investment (see Arquímedes, 2018; DNP, 2018c), our findings on the Tribugá Port call into question the viability of such proposals. Drawing on views on well-being that are rooted in local livelihoods, identity, culture, and organizational processes of the Afro-Colombian community in Nuquí, we found viable alternatives to the dominant narrative centered on the spatial reorganization of capitalism to cater to the needs of industrial and commercial accumulation. Similar to scholarly contributions analyzing labor exploitation and the erosion of biological diversity in other contexts (see Narchi et al., 2020), we found local alternatives arising from Nuquí to be a direct response to dominant understandings of development that foster exploitation of livelihoods and coastal landscapes. Local perspectives on planning the future of collective territories prioritize communal access to land and ocean resources in order to sustain the community’s livelihoods and biological diversity.
The postdevelopment literature provides a place-based understanding of well-being that helps overcome the obfuscation of the needs of local communities. Applying this to the context of Nuquí has not only allowed us to go beyond the limitations of the mainstream literature that praises the developmental effects of maritime infrastructure investments. It also helps substantiate our empirical understanding of the LRCC’s well-being perspectives and long-term planning processes.
Conclusion
As part of modern capitalist development, maritime infrastructure development in Colombia has entailed a deepening of neoliberal accumulation strategies, which implies dispossession and the undermining of access to coastal lands.
The dominant narrative of the Tribugá Port project connecting Nuquí to the land-locked highlands, as well as to global markets, envisions a positive impact on the local community. The overall macroeconomic effects of this maritime infrastructure project through incentivizing trade and investments are seen as beneficial to the entire country. The Colombian government and private investors have put forward this optimistic discourse to justify the negative effects on social, economic, and environmental conditions in the affected areas. However, this dominant narrative on infrastructure investments in marginalized territories neglects local initiatives and ignores alternative perspectives on well-being. This partial view on development has often obfuscated the relations local communities have with their territories. The mainstream development discourse views the poor as a homogeneous group that lacks basic necessities and requires development initiatives from the outside in order to provide infrastructure, market access, and goods and services, among other benefits.
This article has used theoretical arguments from heterodox political economy, critical economic geography, and the postdevelopment literature to put forward conceptual alternatives and long-term visions that can add analytical value to our understanding of “development.” It has also shown that the LRCC and other people from Nuquí are largely opposed to the Tribugá Port, which they see as a threat to their vision of well-being and permanence in their territory.
The proposal for the Tribugá Port in Afro-Colombian and indigenous territories highlights several contradictions of infrastructure policy inherent in dominant logics of development. While the Tribugá maritime infrastructure development is supposed to increase economic activity in a sustainable way, the demands for land and coastal resources that it involves endanger the ways of life of the local community. It also threatens the long-term plans of the territories, which are rooted in local economic practices, identity, culture, and deep understandings and relations with the environment. Policies that are truly concerned with people’s well-being need to take into account the practices and visions of the local population, especially those that are organized and represented by the political structures of ethnic communities.
Footnotes
Notes
Tobias Franz is a lecturer in economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Diana Gómez is an associate professor at the Interdisciplinary Center for Development Studies at the Universidad de Los Andes. C. Julián Idrobo is a research associate in the Department of Zoology of the University of British Columbia and an adjunct professor in the Interdisciplinary Center for Development Studies at the Universidad de Los Andes. Olga Corzo is a project coordinator at Red PaPaz.This work was supported by the Center for Interdisciplinary Development Studies.