Climate eco-governmentality: Contested knowledge and the production of climate change geographies in Colombian mangrove ecosystem

State control (1970–1990)

Following the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands in 1975, which highlighted the importance of preserving wetland ecosystems and the UNESCO World Heritage Convention of 1975 that stressed the cultural value of mangroves, the first Colombian laws on mangrove conservation emerged in the 1970s. Working alongside the National Institute of Renewable Natural Resources and the Environment (INDERENA), the earliest national institutional definitions positioned mangroves primarily as water resources. Within this framing, promoting responsible fishing became central due to the ecosystem's role in supplying food and wood. Decree 1681 of 1978 was the first national institutional document addressing mangrove conservation. It is important to note that no data exists prior to 1960 that would allow for an assessment of the state of the mangroves (López-Angarita et al., 2016). This decree emphasized conservation and responsible use of hydrobiological resources, viewing mangroves primarily as food providers, after a long history in which mangroves did not even appear in public policy and were seen as unproductive and uninhabited spaces (López-Angarita et al., 2016).

Following this first decree and reinforcing the idea of national control over the ecosystem, Decree 2324 of 1984 was promulgated by the Ministry of Defence. This decree regulated the action of the military forces in marine sectors, ports, and other water spaces. With this decree, mangroves were defined as objects of state protection and public use. This indicates that mangroves were integrated into a centralised control system led by the national government. Today, DIMAR (Colombian Maritime Authority) continues to exercise control over mangrove ecosystems and currently plays a key role in reporting crimes associated with the illegal logging, controlling fishing vessels, and participating in discussions on territorial and maritime planning.

Although the first laws concerning mangroves emerged in the 1970s, and the earliest data on their conservation status dates to the 1960s. Local communities, such as the Caño Lobo mangrove association in Cispatá Bay, had long relied on the ecosystem for sustenance, building homes, and other needs. One of the leaders of the association in Cispatá Bay said, “We have been here for a long time because the slaves who had the opportunity to escape would go to the mangroves, in these places, this is where we, as Black and Campesino people, could live.” In these ecosystems and their surroundings, local communities territorialised their daily life, making the ecosystem central to the reproduction and production of life. These claims are supported by archaeological and archival records showing that mangrove areas in the Colombian Caribbean and Pacific have been inhabited since pre-Columbian times, and that one of the principal uses of these forests has historically been the extraction of wood for construction (López-Angarita et al., 2016).

Regarding the military control process over the mangroves and the disruption of local relations, Don Gabriel, ⁴ a manglero from Cispatá, comments, “Between 1960 and 1973, Los mangleros still lived in the mangrove canals, because there we could manage our economy. We collect only what we need, not what we want” That means that, despite the control, the legislation encountered a territorial resistance process based on sustainable practices of care and knowledge at the local level. Thus, amid controversies, this first moment is characterised by local communities defending their territorial rights from mangrove management legislation that did not yet recognise the historical connection between communities and mangroves (see Figure 2). López-Angarita et al. (2016) also point out that Colombia—like several other countries in the region—did not include legislation specifically addressing ecological value and their long-standing relationships with local communities during this early period. On the contrary, mangroves were widely regarded as potentially productive land to be controlled.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

First moment: state control (1970-1990). Own elaboration.

This first moment is therefore characterized by an emerging and incipient national institutional framework concerning mangroves, one largely oriented toward their military control. This occurred in parallel with the rise of international agreements in which these ecosystems began to be framed as key spaces within debates on heritage and biodiversity. At the local level in the Caribbean, meanwhile, mangroves remained historically inhabited by Black and Campesino peoples who relied on them primarily for construction materials, housing, and fishing. Thus, one of the roots of contested climate change geographies in the Colombian Caribbean begins with the incorporation of mangroves into state-controlled spaces, where the state, backed by international treaties, was called upon to reassert authority over these ecosystems.

Biodiversity and Black and Campesino communities (1990–2000)

In Colombia, the 1990s began with a constitutional reform that established the right to a healthy environment as a fundamental right. This shift strengthened environmental institutions and opened the way for the ratification of key international treaties governing ecosystems such as mangroves, including the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in 1993. As a result, the Ministry of Environment—created by Law 99 of 1993—adopted principles aligned with biodiversity protection. These principles were translated into national regulations, some of which prohibited the local use of mangroves, particularly the extraction of mangrove wood for timber. At the national level, environmental governance was reorganized through the creation of the National Environmental System (SINA), a multi-level institutional framework composed of national authorities, a network of Autonomous Regional Corporations (CARs), organized by river basins, and research institutes such as INVEMAR (Institute of Marine and Coastal Research), among others. This structure consolidated the State's capacity to regulate, monitor, and plan ecosystems, reinforcing a centralized and technical approach to environmental management.

This new institutional framework produced new regulations to the management of mangroves mainly connected to biodiversity schemas. Most of the specific regulations were issued in the mid-1990s, focusing on planning, monitoring, control, and surveillance of mangroves (Dirección de Asuntos Marinos, Costeros y Recursos Acuáticos 2023) (see Figure 3). For example, in the resolution 1602 of 1995, mangroves were understood as conservation areas where interactions with humans were not necessarily the centre of sustainability processes. Their value was, therefore, purely biological related to their biodiversity. At the community level, specifically in the Caribbean, in the Bay of Cispatá, this understanding of mangroves kept affecting local livelihoods and labour. As Doña Ignacia de Rosa, a member of the mangleros in Cispatá, mentions, this law prohibited the logging of mangroves that the communities in this area were historically undertaking. She mentions that the prohibition came with arguments related to the ecosystem value of mangroves: “That's when the CVS (Regional Corporation of the Valley of the Sinú River) and INDERENA came out saying there would be no more permits to use the mangroves because they were saying the world is warming and we need to take care of the forest… That's when they banned the cutting of mangroves by a resolution”.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

Second moment: biodiversity and Black and Campesino communities (1990–2000). Own elaboration.

A key feature of the early 1990s is that the implementation of biodiversity-oriented legislation—aligned with emerging international conservation frameworks—translated into national prohibitions that were rapidly contested and reworked locally and nationally. Laws restricting mangrove use, especially bans on logging, clashed with the everyday practices, labour and livelihoods of Black and Campesino communities who depended on mangrove forests for construction, fishing, and subsistence. These prohibitions triggered different forms of local response: in places such as La Virgen and Juan Polo Marsh, Black communities mobilized the newly established Law 70 on Black Communities to defend their territorial rights and challenge exclusionary conservation mandates; while in Cispatá Bay, mangleros negotiated directly with regional environmental authorities, asserting the legitimacy of their knowledge and practices to preserve the biodiversity and the mangrove itself.

As a result, the logging prohibition were claimed, resisted, and reported locally by various communities along the country. In Cispatá, the mangleros continued lobbying local authorities to reclaim their rights to use and manage the mangrove ecosystem. Meanwhile, at the national level, Black communities mobilized in the wake of Law 70 of 1993, ⁵ demanding that the government guarantee the territorial rights they had secured in earlier years. After discussions at regional and national levels, The Ministry of Environment issued the Resolution 020 of 1996, clarifying that forestry use of mangroves could be allowed, but it must be done through the regional autonomous corporations that are responsible for enforcing environmental legislation. Then, the communitarian contestation at different scales was based on an initial process of reshaping environmental policies connected with biodiversity, seeking to integrate important daily activities, and labour for local life reproduction and production.

Nationally, the Law 70 of 1993 known as the Black Communities Law is a key element for understanding the territorial defence processes undertaken by local communities. This law based on the understanding that mangroves in Colombia are common goods owned by the State, decreed that the State must recognise the Black communities that occupy these ecosystems. This law, the result of mobilisation, complicated the conservation landscape of natural spaces like mangroves and allowed Black communities to reclaim or at least begin to dispute their presence and territoriality in these ecosystems. Through this law, Black communities demonstrated that mangroves are part of Black history and, therefore, must be part of the communitarian spaces.

However, the implementation of this law has taken different forms and has responded to varying Pacific and Caribbean struggles. In the Caribbean, some communities, such as La Boquilla and Villa Gloria at the La Virgen and Juan Polo Marsh, opted to claim their territorial rights to mangroves under this figure of community councils for Black Communities. There, the struggle for territorial defence began in the mid-nineties, and there is still no guarantee of collective land titles that would allow the Black communities of Cartagena to make use of the mangroves or their territories; however, in Cispatá Bay, although the population recognises itself as Black communities, they preferred, according to their leaders, to continue negotiating with the regional autonomous corporation to guarantee their rights to territory and the use of the mangrove. Locally, in Cispatá Bay, the negotiation took place because a joint documentation space promoted between the local communities and regional corporations, where locally produced knowledge was essential for any intervention in the bay. Don Jose mentions, “We started documenting ourselves and began telling people, no, but we should look for or create a law that protects us… we have rights, we talked about territorial rights, about where people lived”. Both the debates related to the Black Communities territorial rights in Cartagena and the forestal use of mangroves derived from territorial rights in Cispatá Bay occurred in a process where technical laws (Resolution 1602 of 1995 and Resolution 020 of 1996) were the legal basis for control, planning, and management of the mangrove ecosystem.

Thus, the first part of the 1990s marks a pivotal moment in which key interactions and negotiations between local communities and state institutions, shaped by emerging international agendas, began to redefine mangrove governance. Prohibitive approaches, grounded in the ecological and technical logics of biodiversity preservation, were challenged by localized forms of territorial defence and knowledge-based claims to inhabit and use the ecosystem. Hence, by the mid-1990s, two political trajectories converged: one that framed mangroves primarily as ecological assets to be protected through technical regulation, and another that understood them as lived, socio-ecological spaces central to Black and Campesino histories. These trajectories placed mangroves at the centre of environmental debates from two directions, one rooted in conservationist control, the other in the defence of life and territory, laying the foundations for the contested climate change geographies analysed in this paper.

These dynamics intensified with the promulgation of two additional resolutions in the latter half of the 1990s: Resolution 257 of March 1997 and Resolution 924 of October 1997. Both emerged within a national context in which environmental institutions were seeking to address growing concerns over mangrove degradation. Developed almost in parallel, these legal instruments reveal how Black and Campesino communities shaped debates over the meaning of conservation. The first resolution focuses primarily on the biotic dimensions of mangroves, while the second explicitly addresses the economic activities of local communities within the ecosystem. In this sense, local practices of defending mangroves as historical and inhabited spaces were central to the emergence of legal frameworks that began to recognize the relationship between people and mangroves as essential for biodiversity conservation.

In Resolution 257 of March 1997, mangroves were understood as a forest without people that needed to be protected from degradation. In that resolution, the only mention concerning the community was related to the requirement for prior consultations in case projects changed land uses. Doña Ignacia from Cispatá debating: “But how are they going to tell me that my mangroves are disappearing when they’re still there. I’m there every day, and there are more mangroves each day. I got a little upset. I started losing my patience.” In contrast, Resolution 924 of October 1997 -produce just seven months later- included for the first time in the debate the necessity of mangrove zoning that encompassed previous uses and affected communities, for which studies on the ecosystems were needed.

This resolution, which, as mentioned, was shaped by some of the debates promoted by Black and Campesino communities in their defence of their territories, was a first step in the later definition of mangroves as socio-ecological systems that emerged in the 2000s. Tied to the need to identify the current state of the mangrove ecosystem in its diversity, Resolution 924 of 1997 ordered the CARs to issue management and zoning plans for mangroves within their jurisdiction on a regional scale. These plans, among other things, had to include mapping of actors, zoning of areas for the use or veto of economic activities, historical maps of degradation processes, and other elements. This meant that the resolution obligated regional authorities to generate data and knowledge on the condition of the mangrove ecosystems and their people. Despite the legal call, the development of these research and documents was not carried out in detail or fully in all regions. For example, in the Cispatá Bay, the documentation was made in a collaboration between the CAR and mangleros communities. In contrast, in La Virgen and Juan Polo Marsh, the CAR acted as a technical institution and locally, Black communities did not feel part of the discussion. This means that data production about mangroves has developed unevenly. In La Virgen and Juan Polo Marsh, this process fundamentally focused on producing technical data associated with coverage, general degradation status, biodiversity issues, and the recovery capacity of mangroves. In contrast, a more participatory approach that involved mangleros as knowledgeable stewards of the territory was carried out in Cispatá Bay.

In the Colombian Caribbean, individuals connected to academia, such as Heliodoro Sánchez-Páez and his collaborators, were key in this process. The team led by him, a forest engineer, within the framework of a national project called the Mangroves of Colombia Project (MCP), funded by the International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO), and coordinated by the Ministry of Environment and the Colombian Association of Forest Engineers, constitutes the largest inventory of mangroves at the national level (Álvarez-León et al., 2021). All this data was collected and compiled in the mid-1990s and has since provided the most significant amount of open data used by the government for ecosystem planning processes. It is key to mention that Heliodoro Sánchez-Páez, besides being a university professor and involved in research, was also the director of INDERENA. This institute began controlling and characterising mangroves.

Mangleros in Cispatá were very important in this data production process locally and its connections to the communitarian work. Don Alfonso comments that before the institutions arrived to implement the research and the management plans, they had already started the data collection and the restoration, as a form of ecological care and sustainable engagement with the mangrove: ‘We started it ourselves without anyone telling us it was restoration or monitoring. We called it cleaning the canals, recovering the canals. Caring for the mangroves” During the 1990s, several academics involved in mangrove planning worked in the area, including the Heliodor Sánchez-Páez team, focusing on sustainable management of mangrove wood, some amphibian species, and generally on tourism-related topics. During these years, groups of mangleros continuously trained, creating management and organisation projects for mangroves that would later be reflected in the subsequent publication and declaration of the integrated management district (DMI acronym in Spanish) of the Cispatá Bay. As some of the founders of the mangleros association comment, the joint work was based on the idea that there was no one better than the mangleros to care for mangroves because they are the ones who know the mangroves. Doña Ignacia comments: “They came in to do studies, so we agreed with the communities to start talking about what we wanted to achieve with those studies and how we would collaborate. Our conclusion is the mangrove allows us to use it so that we can, and we know how to take care of it.”

During this second moment (1990–2000), especially in Cispatá Bay, a series of relationships were consolidated between local knowledge and practices with the intervention of academics and other institutions that entered the territories with a perspective aimed at including communities in their stewardship. In contrast, in Cartagena—particularly in the surroundings of La Virgen and Juan Polo Marsh—local knowledge became shaped by territorial defence processes unfolding along the northern margins of the marsh. While in Cispatá the interplay and re-politicization of mangrove knowledge emerged through dialogue and collaborative work among academia, state institutions, and mangleros, in Cartagena the interplay was more contested and centred on struggles for territorial rights. In La Virgen and Juan Polo Marsh, technical knowledge about the ecosystem prevailed within institutional debates, whereas at the local level the struggle focused on securing land titling and the recognition of Black communities as key actors in the Marsh and in the care and use of the mangrove.

This implies that the implementation of national laws did not unfold uniformly at the local level, and the incorporation of local debates occurred in highly uneven ways. While the case of Cispatá illustrates a process in which community knowledge was part of the discussion into mangrove assessments—supported by a strong role for academic actors—the interplay between Black communities in Cartagena and environmental institutions was far more fraught. In this context, environmental governance processes ultimately excluded local claims to land and the recognition of Black communities as territorial actors, reinforcing long-standing inequalities in access to decision-making and environmental policy.

This second moment (1990–2000) must be understood in relation to the first one, when mangrove governance in Colombia was defined primarily through military control and their classification as uninhabited, strategic border ecosystems. Against this backdrop, the early 1990s marked a profound institutional shift: the constitutional recognition of the right to a healthy environment and the creation of a national environmental framework aligned with emerging international biodiversity agendas. This new institutional landscape produced regulatory regimes that rapidly collided with the daily practices, territorial histories, and socio-ecological relations of Black and Campesino communities. The uneven responses to prohibitions on mangrove use illustrate how climate eco-governmentality began to take shape through multi-scalar negotiations, exclusions, and alliances. These interplays show that mangrove governance was never solely institutional but emerged from frictions and convergences between technical, legal, and locally embedded knowledge. Together, these dynamics constituted the second foundational layer in the production of contested climate change geographies, setting the stage for the next moment in which climate adaptation, mitigation, and blue carbon markets would further reconfigure the environmental governance.

Climate change (2000–2022)

The third moment of this entangled history of mangrove governance in Colombia relates to how mangroves are integrated first into land-use planning and then into climate change policies, which have become relevant due to the increasing frequency of extreme weather events and the increase in international policies associated with mitigation, particularly blue carbon market schemes.

In relation to land-use planning policies, at the national level, from the 2000s onwards, based on the data produced in the 1990s, Colombian environmental institutions issued several administrative acts focusing on creating regional regimes for using mangroves (see Figure 4). At that time, Decree 3600 of 2007 established guidelines for rural and urban planning, emphasising the integration of strategic ecosystems. However, the planning process remained the responsibility of regional, municipal, and departmental authorities, so although the law was national, its application had to be made at regional level.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 4.

Third moment: climate change (2000–2022). Own elaboration.

In this regionalisation process, it is worth highlighting the work undertaken by the mangleros of Cispatá. In this place, a joint effort between local communities, academics, and regional environmental management institutions agreed that regional sustainability needed to include forest uses within land-use planning while restoring, conserving, and generating joint management plans. These dialogues resulted from territorial defence processes in the 1990s, culminating in 2010 with the proposal of the Integrated Management District (DMI acronym in Spanish) (Rojas Giraldo and Sierra Correa, 2010). The DMI's Integral Management Plan was developed through Cooperation Agreement No. 92 of 2007 between CVS and INVEMAR. This document was preceded by technical guides and ecosystem diagnoses. In these documents, the relationships between climate change, biodiversity conservation, community participation, and local contestations are already evident and formed the basis for the multi-scale negotiation.

However, the negotiation that took place in the Cispatá Bay was not replicated in other parts of the Caribbean, where communities continued to be side-lined from land-use planning, use, and management of the ecosystem, as is the case in the La Virgen and Juan Polo Marsh in Cartagena. Land-use plans for the La Virgen and Juan Polo Marsh were prepared by professionals contracted by the regional environmental authority, CARDIQUE. These plans took the form of highly technical documents in which community participation was limited to consultation mechanisms, prioritizing the production of technical knowledge rather than fostering substantive community dialogue. This dynamic was shaped by the fact that debates over territorial rights and collective land titling for Black communities were still ongoing at the time, constraining the extent to which local claims and local forms of knowledge could be meaningfully incorporated.

There, the regional planning process occurred unevenly and addressed diverse forms of territorial defence in each mangrove area in the Caribbean. These scalar encounters and mismatches demonstrate how, in different places, the interplay among actors produced distinct institutional responses regarding the management and knowledge production of mangrove ecosystems. The incorporation of mangroves into land-use and territorial planning policies became a decisive moment for observing how such interplays materialized: in contexts where local dialogues occurred, planning processes reflected negotiations over the uses and meanings of the ecosystem, whereas in other locations this incorporation reinforced exclusionary practices and even the criminalization of local communities.

Eight years later mangroves became protagonists of national policies again, in conjunction with international climate change treaties. Despite since the 1990s several academic studies had already noted that mangroves play a key role in climate adaptation processes, by 2018, new land-use laws emerged in the national landscape that mention mangroves as strategic ecosystems for climate change adaptation and mitigation. The Ministry of Environment, through Resolution 1263 of 2018, updated specific measures to guarantee the sustainability and integral management, adjusting the mangrove planning and adopting three instruments: the “Guidelines for Mangrove Ecosystem Restoration in Colombia,” the “Guidelines for Mangrove Monitoring in Colombia,” and the “Information System for Mangrove Management in Colombia – SIGMA” (Minambiente, 2017).

These guidelines involved the participation of former Deputy Minister of Environment Sandra Vilardy (2022–2023), who knew and worked closely with the process in the Cispatá Bay and other regional mangroves in the Caribbean. This is noteworthy and shows the relevance to integrate laws regarding mangroves that consider biotic and social components as intertwined. In these guidelines, the social component “includes the inhabitants and users of mangrove services, their distribution in the territory, the activities they carry out, and the organisations and institutions that influence it” (Vilardy et al., 2014). Although these guidelines addressed some of the problems associated with the uneven regionalisation, the comprehensive application of policies has begun to be recognised. These instruments, partly due to the territorial defence led by Black and Campesino communities and due to the emergence of climate emergencies (for example, the 2010 floods caused by the La Niña phenomenon) in different parts of the country, prompted the inclusion of social components and the need to think locally about climate change adaptation and mitigation.

Thus, these three documents share two important characteristics that, using some local experiences as examples, such as the Cispatá Bay, are key to understanding how local knowledge and practices also contributed to the construction of national policies. These elements reflect the influence of both international frameworks and locally grounded processes, revealing how policy is constructed through multiple perspectives that often appear contradictory in practice. The first characteristics relates to understanding mangroves as socio-ecological systems. The definition of mangroves in Resolution 1263 of 2018 is stated as:

“Mangroves correspond to a socio-ecological system, in which the natural component and the social interact and have evolved together, since practices such as fishing, gathering crustaceans and molluscs, hunting, wood extraction, fuel wood and medicinal plants, and transportation, among other activities carried out in these areas, have woven close and indivisible links between the natural and the social.” (Resolution 1263 of 2018)

A second characteristic of these guidelines is that they reflect an international push to develop global instruments for climate change mitigation and adaptation. They emerged following Colombia's 2005 ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, which emphasized mangroves as critical ecosystems for carbon capture due to their role in the global carbon cycle and CO² absorption. Mangrove conservation also addresses deforestation, a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. The 2015 ratification of the Paris Agreement further reinforced this focus by setting Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) for emission reductions, highlighting biodiversity protection and wetland conservation as priorities for countries with these ecosystems.

With the ratification of these two international agreements related to climate change, what happened in places like the Cispatá Bay was that local struggles seeking to understand the complementarity of mangroves with ways of life began an intense dialogue with ecosystem conservation projects tied to international strategies such as REDD+. As is commented locally, what allowed this plan to be developed collaboratively, without erasing the inequalities in the hierarchy between technical knowledge and knowledge from the local scale, was that:

“In 2015, that's when they started with the study that had been done on carbon credits. Many mangleros participated. We then began to talk about REDD+, the impacts, and all of that. That's when the process of CI (International Conservation) came in, along with Fundación Omacha, and then INVEMAR and CVS followed, as well as the older mangleros. Yes, those of us who have lived here our whole lives.” (Doña Ignacia de la Rosa, Fieldwork, 2023, March 12, personal communication)

However, other social organisations globally criticised these solutions for considering them market-based and untrue -false- solutions to structural problems (Hoz et al., 2024; Moreano Venegas et al., 2022; Plataforma Latinoamericana y del Caribe por la Justicia Climática, 2021, 2022). Organisations such as the World Rainforest Movement and the Global Forest Coalition argue that these solutions are implemented in territories that have been previously dispossessed and affected by extractive projects, producing new inequalities and depriving communities of their rights (Global Forest Coalition, 2021; World Rainforest Movement, 2022). They also argue that nature-based solutions, especially those associated with REDD + projects, do not overcome the market logic that commodifies nature. Moreover, these solutions risk further dispossessing local communities of their territories and ways of relating to nature, as they do not consider local contexts and will transform everyday life (Onta et al., 2021). Civil organisations also argue that these solutions will endanger the rights of Indigenous, Black, and Campesino communities. In Latin America specifically, some regional platforms indicate that the so-called green solutions are racist, patriarchal, and colonial and that they only deepen historical and gender inequalities (Acción Ecológica, 2021). Within this context of controversies and multi-scalar dialogues, places like the Cispatá Bay managed to consolidate participation and contestation processes where local communities feel represented, especially the mangleros.

In the current phase of global mangrove governance, the emergence of Vida Manglar as a blue carbon project places Cispatá Bay within a growing global trend that reframes mangroves as “natural capital” for carbon accounting. While the longstanding interplay among mangleros, academics, and regional institutions in Cispatá has produced a multi-scalar encounter—one in which local knowledge has effectively shaped restoration practices and ecosystem management—blue carbon schemes introduce new risks that echo critiques raised in the wider literature (Song et al., 2021). As global carbon markets privilege technocratic, accounting-oriented approaches, they risk sidelining the complex social relations, mixed livelihood economies, and customary forms of tenure that have historically grounded mangrove stewardship in Cispatá. The emphasis on carbon metrics may displace or overshadow the relational, socio-ecological understandings of mangroves that local communities have defended for decades. Thus, even in a place where collaborative governance has been relatively strong, blue carbon projects threaten to recentralize decision-making, narrow the scope of legitimate knowledge, and reconfigure power in ways that could erode the very encounters between scales that enabled Cispatá's governance model to emerge.

In this final moment (2000–2022), it becomes evident that the uneven ways in which policies materialize across territories reveal scale as a permeable and relational process rather than a fixed administrative framework (Neumann, 2009). In Cispatá Bay, the articulation between mangleros, academics, and regional institutions fostered a multi-scalar dialogue that enabled local knowledge to shape ecosystem management, even in the implementation of climate change projects such as those linked to blue carbon schemes. This ambivalent scalar alignment made it possible for local practices of labour, care and restoration to be recognized within regional and national policy frameworks, contributing to the emergence of an alternative governance model grounded in the interplay of technical expertise and local knowledge. By contrast, the case of Villa Gloria and the La Virgen and Juan Polo Marsh illustrates what happens when local knowledge is excluded and criminalized. Here, climate and biodiversity policies were implemented without meaningful participation, reinforcing longstanding racialized hierarchies and producing new climate injustices (Quiroga Manrique et al., 2026). These exclusions catalysed territorial defence efforts through which Black communities contested the narratives and interventions imposed on the ecosystem. Together, both cases demonstrate that the politics of scale shapes not only which knowledges count, but also whose practices and territorial claims become legible within climate policy.