Political Geography 60 (2017) 57e65

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Political Geography
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo

Ambivalent desires: State formation and dispossession in the face of

climate crisis
Alejandro Camargo a, 1, Diana Ojeda b, *, 1
a
Department of Geography, University of Montreal, Pavillon 520 Co ^te-Sainte-Catherine, Montr
eal QC H2V 2B8, Canada
b
Instituto Pensar, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Cra 7 No. 40A - 54 Bogota D.C. Colombia

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: In this paper, we analyze the politics, experiences and dynamics of state formation in a particular context
Received 17 August 2016 of climate crisis. Through the study of the implementation of state-led adaptation and mitigation projects
Received in revised form in two rural localities of northern Colombia, we interrogate the ways in which these interventions shape
31 March 2017
the everyday lives of those who happen to be located in the targeted areas. We found that, in spite of the
Accepted 2 April 2017
different goals and particular configurations of the adaptation and mitigation interventions, these
climate projects engendered the same contradiction. They promised a resilient and environmentally
sound future, but the path towards that future has not been available to everyone. Furthermore, we show
Keywords:
Adaptation
that the subjects of climate interventions do not embrace state promises in the same way. Local ex-
Mitigation pectations, desires and engagement with the state are ambivalent and heterogeneous, and cannot be
Climate crisis taken as a given. This paper develops these ideas by way of three arguments. First, we argue that
State formation exclusion, dispossession and marginality are inherent to the promises of climate mitigation and adap-
Dispossession tation in the cases we study in the Colombian Caribbean. Secondly, the goals of state-led adaptation and
Colombia mitigation programs we study are at odds with the material and social conditions of the areas of
implementation. And thirdly, paying attention to the dynamics of state formation in the Colombian
Caribbean in relation to climate change challenges common binaries opposing state absence/presence,
failure/success, and retreat/return.
© 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction state practices, discourses and interventions were reconfigured in

In 2010, Colombia experienced one of the most dramatic di-
sasters in its recent history. Record-breaking rains associated with
the intensification of La Nin ~ a phenomenon caused catastrophic
flooding across the country and created a profound socio-
environmental crisis. More than 300 people died and the official
direct victims reached 2 million (Semana, 2010; see also; Alsema,
2010). Thousands of families lost their homes and means of sub-
sistence, rural and urban infrastructures collapsed, and thousands
of hectares of productive land were submerged. Officially consid-
ered to be a consequence of global climate change, this crisis also
set the stage for the advent of new state formations. A myriad of
* Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: fa.camargo.alvarado@umontreal.ca (A. Camargo), diana.
ojeda@javeriana.edu.co (D. Ojeda).
1
The authors equally contributed to the article, names listed in alphabetical
order.
the aftermath of the 2010 catastrophe, including: costly state-led
projects in the name of mitigation and adaptation to climate
change; the incorporation of climate issues in rural and urban
development agendas; and the creation of official cartographies of
risk, vulnerability and climate-sensitive ecosystems.
In this article, we delve into the politics, experiences, and dy-
namics of state formation at this particular conjuncture of climate
crisis. We interrogate how the implementation of specific state
projects intended to tackle this crisis shape the everyday lives of
those who happen to be located in the areas of intervention. In
order to study this issue, we focus on mitigation and adaptation
initiatives, the two “principal policy approaches to global climate
change” (Jennings, 2011, p. 238). We examine the particular con-
cretions of state “presence” and “absence” in the implementation of
climate mitigation and adaptation projects in two rural localities of
the Colombian Caribbean region [Map 1]. The first locality, South-
ern Atlantico, was the most dramatically affected area by the La
Nin~ a phenomenon in 2010. As a consequence, it became a priority
zone for post-disaster adaptation programs. The second locality,

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2017.04.003
0962-6298/© 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
58 A. Camargo, D. Ojeda / Political Geography 60 (2017) 57e65
ntico and Montes de María subregions in the Colombian Caribbean.
Map 1. Southern Atla
Montes de María, has been constructed by official and public
discourse as a post-conflict region where rural development pro-
grams have successfully addressed climate mitigation challenges,
thereby establishing a promising green economy. In spite of their
different goals and particular configurations, these climate policies
engender the same contradiction. They promised a resilient and
environmentally sound future, but the path towards that future has
not been available to everyone. Exclusion and marginality, as we
explain in this chapter, are inherent to the promises of climate
change mitigation and adaptation. Our analysis of state in-
terventions in these areas, therefore, exposes the tensions and
contradictions that underlie new state formations in the face of
global climate change.
We will develop three arguments. First, we argue that state
promises of a resilient solution to the crisis are ironically predicated
on the dispossession of rural populations. As our case studies show,
the resulting subtle and everyday forms of dispossession make a
case for understanding dispossession, not only as a precondition for
capitalist accumulation, but also as an “ensuing, derivative condi-
tion of enforced deprivation of land, rights, livelihood, desire, or
modes of belonging” (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013: 5). Second, the
goals of state-led adaptation and mitigation programs are at odds
with the material and social conditions of the areas of imple-
mentation. The state maintains this discrepancy through the pro-
duction of fictitious scenarios of prosperity and welfare that link
both the local and the global in very problematic and unrealistic
ways. Third, the usual binaries through which the role of the state is
understood in relation to climate change, and to nature more
broadly, -absence/presence, failure/success and retreat/return-
stand at odds with the necessity to closely understand particular
state formations. For example, notions of the return of the state in a
time of climate crisis implicate a prior moment of state absence,
which does not account for the dynamics of state formation in the
Colombian Caribbean. Rather, the advent of the climatic state is yet
another moment in a longer history of continuous state in-
terventions that oscillate between success and failure.
The rest of the paper will be organized in five parts. The first
section clarifies our approach to the state in the context of the
climate change crisis, focusing on the potential of an ethnographic
approach to the study of state formations. The second and third
parts will explore a post-disaster adaptation scheme, as well as the
fictions, contradictions, and discrepancies of a mitigation project,
respectively. The fourth part is a historical and ethnographic
reflection on the ways in which people imagine and experience the
state, often juxtaposing nostalgic memories of a prosperous past
with the uncertain and gloomy futures of climate change programs.
The last part will provide some concluding remarks on the con-
tradictory dynamics of state desires in the face of climate crisis.
Approaching the state
Our understanding of mitigation and adaptation projects in the
Colombian Caribbean region draws on a dialogue between local
experiences of the state and the critical literature on processes of
state formation and their connections to particular productions of
nature. By state formation, we refer here to the geographical con-
figurations and the historical continuum along which the practices,
discourses, symbols, and languages of the state are constantly made
and remade (Corrigan, 1994; Eilenberg, 2012; Hansen & Stepputat,
2001). We approach nature and the state, therefore, as multiscalar
continually emerging and historically contingent realities
(Whitehead, Jones, Jones, 2006: 14), and discuss how a “climatized
nature” (Ulloa, 2012: 17) becomes an important locus of state for-
mation (Asher & Ojeda, 2009). Through an ethnographic approach,
we turn our attention to the multiple and concrete ways in which
the/a national statedas personified and crystallized in government
officials, institutions, development programs and post-disaster
interventionsdis experienced by local populations in their
everyday lives. In doing so, we trace the concrete ways in which
state imaginaries and practices undermine the unified version of
what the state is or should be.
Although we are aware that, as Gupta suggests, “the state is
 A. Camargo, D. Ojeda / Political Geography 60 (2017) 57e65
characterized by various levels that pull in different directions”
(2012: 42), in this paper we focus on how peasants experience,
understand, and interact with the national state. This decision is
based on two empirical facts. First, the mitigation and adaptation
projects we analyze here are directly implemented from the central
state. Secondly, when the people from the study areas speak about
the state, they refer to the authority and agents acting through
national-level institutions. Furthermore, while we agree that the
everyday experience of the state is a crucial site of analysisdwhich
is reflected in the recent explosion of studies on everyday in-
teractions between local population and state officialsdour
approach is more about how the state materializes in concrete
(climatic) natures. This perspective is also informed by a recurrent
phenomenon we have observed in the field for the last five years:
the state appears in our interactions with local populations as a
generalization and as a unified entity. Although contingent and
changing, the national state is a pivotal element in the political life
of peasants in our research sites. These ideas of the state present a
methodological challenge as what local people refer to as the (na-
tional) state needs to be understood as a concrete state formation,
which stands in close relation with the geopolitics of climate
change in problematic ways. Drawing on these reflections, we ask
in this paper where, when, and how is the state present and
experienced in the context of adaptation and mitigation projects.
As we will show, peasants of Southern Atl antico and Montes de
María experience particular configurations of state power and au-
thority in multiple and ambivalent ways. In some occasions people
desire the intervention of the state, whereas in others, they reject it.
The state, in this context, becomes a “nucleus of affection”, as María
Clemencia Ramírez (2011: 10) suggests. While in her analysis of the
cocalero movement in the Putumayo region of Colombia, Ramírez
defines this nucleus of affection in relation to peasants' claim of a
paternalistic state as a form of reparation and the search for justice,
we seek to expand her argument to include the “emotive reper-
toires” that mediate local populations' understandings and expe-
riences of the state and of the political (Bocarejo, 2016; Bolívar,
2005, 2006). In our research experience, some people condemn
state-led adaptation and mitigation programs, while at the same
time they long for the times where state programs supported them
to overcome poverty. In this way, our arguments further prove the
problematic nature of the desire for the state. As many theorists
have pointed out, state experiences and thus state aspirations are
profoundly classed, raced and gendered (e.g., Chaves, 2011; Curiel,
2010; Goldberg, 2002; Jessop, 1990; MacKinnon, 1989; Young,
2003). Rather than assuming that state absence is the “mother of
all evils”, or that state presence is the magic solution to them, we
question the recurrent assumption in public discourse of the desire
of the state (Bolívar, 2010). We turn to this desire as a historical,
geographical and anthropological object of study.
From these perspectives, we engage with the thesis on the
“environment making state,” which situates the production of
territory and the environment at the center of the modern capitalist
state (Parenti, 2015a). In the specific case of the climate crisis,
Christian Parenti observes that the environment making state
comes back to respond to emergencies and socio-economic dislo-
cations (2014a). The state comes back because “only the state has
the economic capacity and political legitimacy to respond at an
appropriate scale […] how the state responds to the climate crisis is
a different question: sometimes it fails, but always it is called.”
(Parenti, 2015a: 1). Although we subscribe to its general formula-
tion, we problematize this argument from the local experiences,
contradictions and ambivalent desires of those who directly face
the interventions of the environment making state in the name of
the climate crisis. According to Gupta (2012), it is at the local level
where the arguably rational character of the state becomes
59
arbitrary. Because of this arbitrariness, as we will show, globally
informed discourses of adaptation and mitigation are locally
experienced as dispossession and marginality. In other words,
climate mitigation and adaptation programs end up exacerbating
the type of vulnerabilities they are supposed to address. Lastly, we
contend that the environment making state does not only operate
within the logic of capital. In the context of catastrophe and climate
change, the production of territory and the environment is also
deeply entrenched in the dynamics of the humanitarian, develop-
mental and “sympathetic state” (Dauber, 2013). Our analysis ulti-
mately seeks to contribute to the political ecology of climate change
(Liverman, 2015; Peet, Robbins and Watts, 2011) and to critical
theorizations of the state in relation to the material and symbolic
geographies that constitute climatized nature as a key site of state
formation.
Southern Atlantico and Montes de María are ideal scenarios to
study these processes of state formation in the face of climate crisis.
We chose these two study areas for the following reasons. First,
these two areas have in common a particular history of state in-
terventions which connects what peasants perceive as successful
state-led agrarian development projects in the 1960s and 1970s,
and adverse interventions in the name of climate change in the 21st
century. These historical trajectories allow us to trace how experi-
ences of the state change over time and the ways in which specific
interventions produce differential interpretations and ideas about
what the state is or should be. Second, after 2010, Southern
ntico became one of the main laboratories for the imple-
Atla
mentation of adaptation projects in Colombia. This was so because
this area was the country's most severely affected by the La Nin ~a
phenomenon in that year. Montes de María, for its part, became the
poster child of post-conflict in the region, a rural area supposedly
claimed from guerrilla troops and put to the service of sustainable
development, and in particular, of climate change mitigation
projects.
Since we approach the dynamics of state formation from the
experience of those living in the targeted areas of climate adapta-
tion and mitigation interventions, ethnography constituted our
main methodological approach. We have conducted fieldwork
independently in the study areas for different periods over the last
six years. In Southern Atl
antico, one of the authors spent all of 2013
in a dissertation research project, and in Montes de María, the other
author has worked with a research team since January 2013. In both
cases, we chose to interview local individuals who directly
benefited or were excluded from climate projects. We had access to
them through peasant organizations who agreed to let us conduct
observations in their communities, meetings with government
agencies, and quotidian spaces. In Southern Atla ntico, one of us
attended 18 community meetings and 9 meetings in which peas-
ants met with government officials. In Montes de María, the
research team leaded by the other one of us attended over 25
community meetings, 2 meetings in which peasants met with
government officials and carried out 5 social cartographic exercises.
Thus, through semi-structured interviews, informal conversations,
ethnographic itineraries, participant observations, and document
analysis we developed a narrative that situates experiences, affec-
tions, discourses and meanings at the center of a particular process
of state formation. In the next two sections, we present how that
narrative unfolds in each of the two study areas.
ntico: the predicaments of adaptation
Southern Atla
The Southern part of the Department of Atla ntico in the
Colombian Caribbean was one of the most seriously affected areas
during the catastrophe of 2010. After weeks of heavy rainfall, the
already deteriorated banks of an artificial waterway known as the
60 A. Camargo, D. Ojeda / Political Geography 60 (2017) 57e65
Dique Canal burst on November 29, 2010. Floodwaters devastated
nearly 35,000 ha of rural arable land and affected more than 42,000
peasant families (Sa nchez, 2011, p. 13). Those families lost almost
everything: their households, crops, livestock, poultry, and do-
mestic and personal belongings. Floodwaters rendered them
landless and homeless overnight and forced them to migrate to
different places. For María, her condition of dispossession was
comparable to that of those who have been victims of the armed
conflict: “Floods dispossessed us of our land, our house, our ani-
mals, our belongings, and the work of so many years […] We were
like all of those landless families whose lands were stolen by the
paramilitaries and were forced to leave” (Manatí, April 26, 2013).
This socio-environmental crisis mobilized national and interna-
tional humanitarian institutions, which provided temporary relief
and aid to the victims of the disaster. Yet the broader concern about
the recovery of the social, infrastructural, and economic life of the
area was fundamentally a state issue.
Two public statements by the recently elected president Juan
Manuel Santos illustrate the ways in which state institutions
stepped in to tackle this crisis. The first statement was delivered
nine days after the collapse of the Dique Canal. President Santos
argued that this catastrophe was a manifestation of global climate
change, and therefore, “our future challenge is to work on our
country's adaptation to this new global climate phenomena”
(Santos, 2010: online). Four years later, President Santos delivered
another speech in which he argued that the catastrophe of 2010
was a tragedy that, thanks to the intervention of government in-
stitutions, turned into a “victory” (Santos, 2014: online). By “vic-
tory,” he meant the large amount of money successfully invested in
adaptation projects intended to bring welfare and resilience to the
victims of the catastrophe.
Through these two statements, President Santos discursively
connected the local crisis of Southern Atla ntico with both global
climate change and the language of adaptation. The materialization
of these discourses and connections was possible through the
creation of the Adaptation Fund (FA henceforth), an institution in
charge of recovering the areas affected in 2010. Among its different
lines of intervention, the FA created a housing project aimed at
relocating the victims of the catastrophe to less vulnerable zones.
Envisioned as an adaptation strategy, however, this project spurred
a sense of abandonment and dispossession among the families
targeted by the project. This adverse outcome was mainly a
consequence of the creation and enforcement of risk zones, which
were initially presented as a way to designate a safe place for the
affected families.
The politics of dignity
When floodwater receded and people were able to return to
their households, they realized that their domestic spaces were
located in risk zones. The FA asked municipal governments to map
the risk zones of their jurisdiction in order to determine what areas
were more prone to flooding, and by implication, which families
needed to be relocated to a safer place. Because of their perilous
condition, these zones were supposed to be uninhabitable and no
type of state infrastructural work was allowed there. Risk zones
ultimately delineated the geographical scope of state interventions
and created a sense of a potential dangerous future embedded in
the cartographies of state power.
In multiple meetings with the victims of the disaster, FA officials
reworked the idea of adaptation to present the housing project as a
“right,” as a way to “give dignity back” to those who lost everything
in the disaster. In practice, however, the housing project involved
different forms of exclusion and dispossession. Because of financial
constraints, the FA was unable to provide housing to everyone. This
meant that inevitably some people would be beneficiary of this
project, whereas othersdin the same condition of vulner-
abilitydwould not. The FA established some requirements to be a
beneficiary of the housing project. Among these criteria, the most
important were that people had to be formerly registered in a na-
tional census of disaster victims, and that they had to show the
titles of their house. Even though the majority of people in
Southern Atla ntico experienced the devastating effects of the
disaster, the state only recognized part of them as victims of the
catastrophe.
As can be expected, those who were excluded expressed their
consternation. In late 2013, around 250 families in one of the most
affected towns filed complaints to the mayor for being excluded
from the housing project. In the aftermath of the disaster many
people migrated to other areas far away from Southern Atla ntico,
including Venezuela where they have relatives and friends. In the
meantime, the census was completed and they could not be
registered. When these families returned to Southern Atla ntico
they became invisible to the state because their names were not in
the census. This unequal distribution of the opportunities of
adaptation projects resulted in the production of a “differentiated
citizenship” (Holston, 2008). Holston coins this term to explain
how the state manages and distributes difference among citizens,
and the implications of that distribution for the production of
inequality. In the case of Southern Atla ntico, those who were
excluded from the housing project lost the possibility of being
adapted and resilient in the terms defined by the state. For many
families who were successfully classified as victims, however, being
eligible for the housing project was far from a privilege.
Subtle dispossession
Whereas some people desired to be included in the state-led
housing project, others refused to be part of it. For these people,
the housing project was a subtle way to dispossess them from their
domestic spaces and the households they had built with their own
hands. Fernando is one of them. He grows a variety of crops in his
backyard and is determined to stay in his house: “I have endured
the hardship of two major floods here in my house. But now the
state comes here and says that I have to leave. This is a form of
forced displacement!” (Manatí, January 9). Many of these rural
families built their domestic spaces in abandoned areas where they
also grew crops and animals. These domestic economies allowed
for the social reproduction of landless families which managed to
make a living in the midst of a very precarious condition. Further-
more, these new informal settlements never had full access to
public utilities and were not part of the official cartographies of
state governance. The agrarian production in the backyards,
therefore, have played a vital role in the survival of these families.
For this reason, reconstructing their backyards was the priority for
the men and women of these neighborhoods in the aftermath of
the disaster.
The experience with the state after the catastrophe was shaped
by the relocation project. As backyards were not officially seen as
agricultural economies, the state never provided any type of tech-
nical assistance for the reactivation of these spaces. People had to
rebuild their domestic economies and infrastructure with their
own means, just as they did when they first settled in the area. In
the meantime, the FA functionaries explained that the relocation
project was intended to enhance the living conditions of the vic-
tims of the catastrophe and to safeguard local inhabitants if another
disaster occurs in the future. The FA argued that their homes were
unsafe and therefore that all the families settled in risk areas had to
accept the relocation project. Yet for those who refused to move
there was an additional message, which not necessarily supported
 A. Camargo, D. Ojeda / Political Geography 60 (2017) 57e65
the discourse of adaptation, dignity and welfare:
We do not force people to leave their homes. We only show
them that it is very inconvenient to live in a risk area. Ultimately,
they are entitled to remain living at the place where they are at
the moment. But if they choose to do so, they won't be included
in any other housing program for the victims of the disaster. And
if another catastrophe occurs in the future, the government
won't provide any help to them either because we already
warned them about the risk of living in those zones (Govern-
ment official, Bogota , April 13, 2013).
This caveat reinforced a sense of state abandonment as well as
the idea that the housing project was, paradoxically, a form of
dispossession. These families felt they were going to be dispos-
sessed of their households, their livelihoods, their rights to be
beneficiaries of the state, and of the memories embedded in the
place they built by themselves. The new houses were smaller and
envisioned as an urban environment detached from any form of
agrarian production. The beneficiaries of the project were seen as
urban inhabitants with no economic or productive relation with
their households. Consequently, people turned out to be trapped in
a dilemma. If they accept the relocation project they would have to
give up their agrarian livelihoods. But if they refuse to move out,
they would have to give up the opportunity to benefit from state
projects. Those who saw the housing project as a form of dispos-
session of their domestic spaces chose the second possibility. They
did so because the emotional, historical, and economic meaning of
their households made more sense to them than the abstract dis-
courses of adaptation, welfare, and risk. Vero nica was one of the
many individuals who refused to leave in spite of the conse-
quences: “I am not going to give up my house. We put so much
work into building it! my neighbors and I agree that we do not want
to see that people from the state prowling around here. If we see
them, we will throw them out” (Manatí, November 23) In this way,
what the FA envisioned as a spatial strategy of adaptation to global
climate change resulted in the local production of dispossession
and state abandonment. The next section illustrates how this
experience of dispossession and marginality is also intrinsic to
state-led mitigation projects. As a consequence, the peasants of
Montes de María turned out to be located in the margins of the
state geographies of climate change.
Montes de María: extractive landscapes of mitigation
As shown in the previous section, the climatic catastrophe of
2010 provided a new grid for understanding, classifying and
intervening in spaces in the name of risk and adaptation. As a
climatized nature materialized in the landscapes of destruction and
reconstruction of Southern Atl antico, new state formations
emerged, resulting in subtle, yet violent forms of dispossession.
While other climatized natures, those of mitigation projects, did
not need to wait for the inundations of 2010, they were still deci-
sively reconfigured by them. The catastrophe provided new pos-
sibilities of legibility, under which oil palm and timber plantations
translated into the raw materials for agrofuels production and
reforestation schemes, at least rhetorically. As the case of Montes
de María shows, mitigation initiatives provided a solid discursive
and material basis for capitalist state formations in the name of
climate change. In municipalities like María la Baja and Ovejas, the
business expectations around agrofuelsdsuch as biodiesel from oil
palm and carbon deposits in the form of teak plantationsdwere
articulated with a massive project of counteragrarian reform
dressed in green.
61
Greengrabbing for a green market
Since 2002, public policies in Colombia have included the pro-

motion of carbon dioxide markets as a national goal. Alvaro Uribe's
government (2002e2010) provided a legislative framework
through which the country became an attractive destination for
direct foreign investment associated with the reforestation busi-
ness. In the same year, the national agency for climate change
mitigation, Grupo de Mitigacio n del Cambio Clima tico (GMCC), was
formed. The creation of “forests”2 that could lessen greenhouse
effect-causing emissions etree plantations that after 35 years of
carbon sequestration can return to their initial purposes (i.e.,
timber)e thus became a way of participating in the international
market of climate change mitigation. They also became a mecha-
nism for achieving local development, conservation goals, illegal
crops eradication and counterinsurgency strategies (CONPES,
2003). Even if the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and
Forest Degradation (REDD) mechanism failed to become a global
scheme of emissions' reduction, Colombia became the fourth
country in Latin America with more projects registered as part of
the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), reporting benefits of
nearly 140 million US dollars in 2010 (Tenthoff, 2011, p. 2). 3 On
March 2017, CDM projects in Colombia represented 7% of 1101
projects in the region, following Brasil, Mexico and Chile (Center on
Energy, Climate and Sustainable Development, 2017).
One example of such reforestation projects is the 2005 imple-
mentation of 3000 ha of teak by the national cement company,
Argos S.A. Registered as part of the CDM, the forest was located in
the municipality of Ovejas in Montes de María, a region where it is
estimated that over 80,000 ha of land were grabbed, and more than
200,000 peasants were violently evicted between 1997 and 2007
(De los Ríos, Becerra and Oyaga, 2012: 32; Verdad Abierta, 2012).
When the company announced its plans to expand the project to
12,000 ha, national media celebrated:
[The project] has had environmental benefits such as the cap-
ture of 900,000 tons of CO2, soil protection, erosion mitigation,
the improvement of water quality, the reduction in the pressure
over natural forests and the creation of refuges and corridors for
fauna. Concerning social benefits, it is worth noting that it has
created 250 direct and permanent employments, and has
improved the structure and quality of education as well as
infrastructure (Portafolio, 2011: online, our translation).
Rural communities directly affected by the mitigation project
tell a completely different story. “That teak is a curse … it sucks up
everything,” said Luis, a member of the local peasant movement
Organizacio n de Poblaciones Desplazadas (Organization of Displaced
Populations, OPDs), while looking sadly at the neatly organized
rows of teak in front of his home (Ovejas, July 2013). The plantation
literally stands on the soil in which his deceased family and friends
have been buried, his crops used to grow, and where the waterhole
that provided for the entire community was located. Forcedly dis-
placed by paramilitary violence in 2004, Luis decided to come back
to his land “only to find it in hands of entrepreneurs.” Luis's story is
2
It is worth noting that the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) has a very
restrictive definition of forests: a continuum area of at least 1 ha, potential height of
at least 5 m, and 30% of canopy cover. Perhaps more importantly, in order to be
eligible, the area cannot be previously classified as forest since 1989, which ex-
cludes native forests (Chavarro et al., 2008, p. 11).
3
The CDM is managed by the United Nations. It funds projects of carbon emis-
sions reduction. Additionally, there are voluntary markets of carbon bonds, like
REDD, that are exchanged in international markets with verification from different
NGOs.
62 A. Camargo, D. Ojeda / Political Geography 60 (2017) 57e65
just one of the many stories of dispossession in a region where
paramilitary violence forcedly uprooted their inhabitants and
opened their resources to the market (Bargent, 2011). As explained
by Ovidio, another peasant, “they [Argos S.A.] wouldn't wait for us
to start leaving to get those trees in” (Ovejas, May 2013). Massacres,
forced disappearances, and widespread terror lie behind the sales
of plots that then became the teak plantations (Ojeda, 2014; Osorio,
2011; Tenthoff, 2011).
One peasant from María la Baja, Freddy, explains it well: “In
order to plant one teak tree to produce oxygen (sic) they forcedly
displace peasants, they take away from the peasant the possibility
to produce … to compensate a harm there, they cause all this harm
here. They should ask themselves sincerely and see how is it that
they try to reduce environmental impacts there” (Ovejas, June
2013). Or, as Senator Iva n Cepeda from the opposition pointed out:
“These commercial projects of reforestation have allowed these
companies to disguise their actions … it is a business that is pre-
sented as clean, when in reality it is drowned in blood, the blood of
the peasants victims of massacres” (quoted in Bargent, 2011, p. 87,
our translation).
Mitigation projects are inseparable from the destruction of the
social and material ecologies they entail; they rely on extractive
landscapes forged through various forms of physical and structural
violence. Efforts of climate change mitigation, such as carbon de-
posits, thus constitute a means of accumulation by dispossession,
as different authors have pointed out (Coronado & Dietz, 2013;
Osborne, 2013). Carbon deposits are part of larger decarbon-
ization strategies that involve the privatization of commons and
rely on state intervention either by law or by force (Bumpus &
Liverman, 2008).
Everyday dispossession with state sanction
The extractive landscapes of climate change mitigationeeither
teak as carbon deposits or oil palm as agrofuelsein Montes de
María have little to do with a weak or absent state. During the 1990s
and 2000s, landgrabbing in the region constituted a profound
counteragrarian reform carried out by paramilitary groups that had
close connections to economic groups and state institutions of all
levels (Verdad Abierta, 2010). This phenomenon is usually referred
to as la parapolítica, hinting to the multiple ways in which the state,
local elites and paramilitary forces overlapped. Moreover, strategies
of landgrabbing included not just coercion, but juridical mecha-
nisms through which paramilitary forces directly influenced the
enforcement of property rights: the coupled workings of the rifle
and the title, as Jacobo Grajales (2011) puts it, guaranteed the
legalization and titling of the stolen lands. Taken lands rapidly
entered the market and became millionaire agribusinesses through
development projects. In 2013, 43% of cultivable land, about
74,000 ha, was in private hands foreign to the region, and mono-
cultures reached more than 100,000 ha (OTEC, 2013: online). In
that way, the state was part and parcel of dispossession in the re-
gion, not just regarding parapolitical (and paraeconomic) alliances,
but through mitigation projects such as the teak plantations in
Ovejas and the oil palm plantations in María la Baja.
Oil palm has been cultivated in Colombia for decades now,
although its remarkable increase coincides with Uribe's govern-
ment, which promoted palm oil not just as an input for the
alimentary and cosmetic industries, but also as biodiesel produc-
tion. A prime flex crop, the expansion of oil palm has represented
major benefits for regional elites, which have increasingly gained
control over vital resources such as land and water. Within this
version of a climatized nature, oil palm plantations have been
rapidly implemented at the expense of local populations' safety and
livelihoods (Coronado & Dietz, 2013, p. 109). As we have
mentioned, direct paramilitary violence worked in tandem with
legalized land acquisition: “if they threaten you, if they close the
road, if they block your access to water, …How not to sell?”,
explained one local leader (María la Baja, November 2013). State-
led projects of rural development are the most responsible for
making palm oil plantations the primary landscape of the region.
The figure of “productive alliances” (in which peasants provide
their land and labor, and the company the starting capital) became
an effective way for companies to ensure their control of land and
water in María la Baja.
Similarly to the case of Southern Atla ntico, dispossession of
water, land and livelihoods in Montes de María has occurred in
sustained and everyday forms of dispossession that, even if less
visible, are highly violent (Ojeda, Petzl, Rodríguez, Rojas, & Quiroga,
2015). At the same time, the case of Montes de María does not
speak of state absence, but of the state's key role in maintaining and
actualizing uneven geographies of resource access and control.
Montes de María and Southern Atla ntico, therefore, became stra-
tegic areas for the consolidation of state power and control in the
name of climate change. The idea of “consolidation,” however,
inevitably puts the question of state absence and presence on the
table.
Beyond state binaries
Adaptation and mitigation are part of a new “language of
governance” (Hansen & Stepputat, 2001) in the political scenario of
contemporary Colombia. Could we argue that this new language
has set the discursive conditions for “the return of the state”
(Parenti, 2015a; 2015b)? In the previous sections we have shown
how the state has played a direct role in the dispossession of rural
communities in the Colombian Caribbean. The state's climatic for-
mations, rather than representing a lack of the state, are key factors
in the displacement, suffering and deteriorating conditions of local
populations. Contradictorily, the displaced peasants are the privi-
leged subjects of discourses of climate change resilience, upon
whom the responsibilities of mitigation and adaptation seem to fall.
In this section, we want to take a closer look at the localized ex-
periences of these populations and their ambivalent desires for the
state. We focus on how people reacted to state intervention pro-
jects undertaken under climate change mitigation and adaptation
policies. By further exploring the ambivalence of their desires for
particular concretions of a climatic state, we illuminate the short-
comings of an abstract and homogenous understanding of the state
and its presence/absence.
Although the people of Southern Atla ntico and Montes de María
have experienced the arbitrariness of the environment making
state differently, their narratives intersect at a historical moment
when the state brought prosperity and welfare to them. This
moment corresponds to the 1960s and 1970s, when the state
sponsored agrarian reform programs and rural development ini-
tiatives. For many of the peasants who currently experience the
dispossession and marginality of adaptation and mitigation pro-
jects, state-led agrarian reform was the opportunity to gain access
to land and thereby be part of a dynamic agricultural economy.
They remember agrarian reform as a glorious time when the state
was benevolent and fought on their side against the power of the
landowners. Even though the peasants' achievements at that time
were the product of their endurance and tireless mobilization for
land, the state played an important role in the relative success of
agrarian reform in Southern Atla ntico and Montes de María
(Zamosc, 1986). This agrarian nostalgia, however, turns into
bitterness when people remember the period that followed the
decline of agrarian reform in the late 1970s. Institutional, political,
and economic changes led to the decay of agrarian reform
 A. Camargo, D. Ojeda / Political Geography 60 (2017) 57e65
programs, and consequently, a socioeconomic crisis took hold in
rural areas (Díaz-Callejas, 2002; Arango Restrepo, 1986; Fajardo,
1983). What was formerly a dynamic agricultural market deterio-
rated into a precarious economy in which peasants constantly
strove to get by.
Far from being a consequence of the absence or withdrawal of
the state, these new landscapes of precariousness and vulnerability
are the direct crystallization of its institutional and economic
restructuring. Funding cuts for state institutions in charge of
agrarian reform, for instance, affected the allocation of agricultural
credits and new land. These landscapes also reflect a broader wave
of counter-revolutions undertaken by many governments
throughout Latin America, which severely eroded the achieve-
ments of peasant mobilization (Veltmeyer, 2005, p. 292). The myth
of an absent state that claims the state has not yet reached pe-
ripheral territories (cf Bolívar, 2010; Serje, 2012)dalbeit popular in
official discoursedserves to effectively obscure the state's role in
the systematic production of the historical geographies of exclu-
sion. In this way, the advent of adaptation and mitigation as forms
of state governance can hardly be seen as a return of the state.
Moreover, an assumed prior retreat of the statedmainly due to
neoliberal policiesdignores the multiple ways in which neo-
liberalism's ideology of state reduction has proven to be a contra-
dictory rhetoric under which state functions to protect capital have
historically expanded, constituting a form of “metaregulation”
defined as “antiregulation” (Peck & Tickell, 2002, p. 400).
Rather, adaptation and mitigation policies are yet another
episode of the historical continuum of state formation in the
Colombian Caribbean region. This continuum, however, is far from
teleological or homogeneous. Our ethnographic approach reveals
that people experience the processes of state formation in multiple
and contingent ways. Furthermore, the plurality and particularity
of such experiencesdespecially in contexts of state-sanctioned
violence and dispossessiondshows that people do not desire the
state in the same way, and that, in some cases, they do not even
desire it at all. Even if the state's relative absence translates into
sharply uneven geographies of exclusion and abandonment, cli-
matic state formations constitute a brutal irruption in the everyday
lives of rural populations in the Colombian Caribbean.
According to accounts of rural populations in Montes de María,
the current need for the state was produced by the state itself
through policies that clearly promote agribusinesses in the name of
development, peace, and climate change mitigation. As Nellys, a
leader of a local peasant organization that is a part of the OPDs,
explains:
When we were in the land (before being forcedly displaced), we
never, nothing, ever had nothing to do with the state! We were
autonomous in what we produced and harvested and sold. We
never had any commitment with any state … or do you think
they helped us plow the land? … [But] if you see what we have
now. It is the state itself that has evicted us, not by gun, but by
plata en la mochila (money in the bag) …: They give you the
money [referring to both subsidies and development projects]
and then, right away, you're displaced again, out of your land …
(Ovejas, March 2013).
Or, as Arnolys, another member of the organization, puts it:
“They have come here with their little projects, that some chickens,
that cacao, that … nothing! We don't want anything; we don't want
no money from the state. We are not beggars … if they let us, we
put this land to produce it all: yam, yucca, corn …” (Ovejas, March
2013). “If they let us,” as he further explained, referred to the close
alliances between state agencies such as the Ministry of Agriculture
and local elites involved with the expansion of agribusinesses,
63
particularly teak and palm oil, and their consequences on restricted
access to land, water and food. “If they let us,” for him, implied
lessenot moreestate intervention.
As rural conditions have further deteriorated over the last few
years (DANE, 2014), rural populations are in dire need of basic
services, including potable water and access to health care. Despite
this critical situation, for most local inhabitants, there is great
suspicion about state programs and institutions, in particular of
those dressed in green. Such generalized distrust even translates
into seeing any form of seeking state support as a deviation from
necessary political work. “I will not deny that state programs of
assistance might work, but we consider that these projects distract
organizations from the defense of territory … One can't live
expecting handouts every three months, one can't live depending
on that” (Edson, María la Baja, February 2014). For Nellys, state
projects only end up dividing the community, “they're not worth it”
(María la Baja, March 2013).
Other rural populations in the region that are living under
precarious conditions do claim some forms of state intervention. As
Leny puts it, “… what we suggest is that the government buys us
some land, that's all we ask the state, nothing else. We don't want
money, nothing. We want land because with it we can grow food
ourselves … we wouldn't need anything else” (María la Baja, June
2013). This ambivalent desire for the stateeto intervene in such
ways that actually leads to a situation of autonomy from itespeaks
to differentiated state experiences and state desires that need to be
analyzed, not as an abstract call for the state, but in their concrete
manifestations. But even if the state is claimed in specific ways, the
rejection of climatic state interventions was constant throughout
our research as the connections between state projects and
different forms of dispossession of water, land and livelihoods
became increasingly evident to people both in Montes de María and
Southern Atl antico.
Many families in Southern Atla ntico, for instance, opposed the
intervention of the state by questioning the very idea of risk. These
families made the state responsible for the collapse of the Dique
Canal, and by doing so, they overthrew the naturalness of the
disaster. Jorge, whose house turned out to be located in a risk zone,
eloquently explained this objection:
The government wants us to move out and live in the houses
they are building for the victims of the catastrophe, but I do not
want to leave my place. I do not fully understand why we have to
leave our place, and I do not understand either why our
neighborhood is a risk zone. The 2010 catastrophe occurred
because the government dismissed our warnings about the
deterioration of the canal. There is nothing natural about that.
So if we are living in a risk zone, does it mean that the gov-
ernment will never repair the canal and therefore our neigh-
borhood is likely to be flooded again? […] I won't let them take
my house away.” (Southern Atla ntico, March, 2013).
When the heavy rains started in 2010, peasant organizations
sent letters to different government institutions expressing their
concern about the likelihood of a catastrophe. The banks of the
Dique Canal were greatly deteriorated and water levels were rising
progressively. Although peasants showed their concern in multiple
ways, they argued that government officials ignored their alerts and
asserted that the area was already protected against flooding. As
Jorge points out, risk zones ultimately reflect the likelihood of a
future negligence on the part of the state, and not the susceptibility
to the effects of climate change.
Yet, as in Montes de María, the experience of the state in
Southern Atla ntico is ambivalent. While in some scenarios people
firmly rejected state interventions, in others, people called for
64 A. Camargo, D. Ojeda / Political Geography 60 (2017) 57e65
them. Floodwaters wiped out crops, livestock, rural houses and
pens. Years of labor and resources invested in the land were lost
overnight. Recovering from that crisis was, therefore, a tough
endeavor that seemed almost impossible without the help of the
state. In August 2012, hundreds of peasants from Southern Atla n-
tico blocked one of the main roads of the region. They mobilized
because of the economic crisis they were going through and the
impossibility of overcoming this situation by themselves. Peasants
demanded the intervention of the President, the Minister of Agri-
culture, and the local governors to jointly create a solution to the
crisis. This demand, however, was far from being a cry for pater-
nalistic benevolence. Peasants demanded the intervention of these
state officials because the institutions they represented were
responsible for the catastrophe of 2010, and by extension,
accountable for the post-disaster economic crisis. In Montes de
María, too, peasants' strategies for making their requests visible to
the stateeranging from road blockades to advancing legal claims in
different state agenciesewere demands for accountability and
making the state “respond” for their role in ongoing processes of
enclosure and dispossession.
ntico and Montes de María
Even if the peasants of Southern Atla
often invoke the state as a unitary and rational entity, their
ambivalent desires and varied experiences account for the need to
theorize the state as a historical and geographical formation; a
contradictory force that materializes in institutions, government
officials, development projects and infrastructure. In this way, the
state has never returned. It has transformed the ways in which it
justifies its existencedthis time as a guarantor of a resilient future.
Peasants' lived experiences of the state hint to the constant and
disputed processes of state formation. Far from being a totalizing
force, the permanent interaction with different state instances and
concretions attest the different ways in which self-determination,
endurance, and dissent often provide a way out.
Conclusions
In this paper, we show that climatic state formations in the
Colombian Caribbean make evident the plurality of state experi-
ences and the ambivalent nature of state desires and rejections.
What people call for and refuse, therefore, are particular concre-
tions of state power, not the return of a predetermined or unified
entity. This argument has implications for both the Colombian
context and the current debates on the state and the climate crisis.
The question of state presence and absence, of its success and
failure, of its effectiveness and cooptation, is central to Colombian
history, both intellectually and politically. Long decades of internal
armed conflict characterized by political violence and state-
sanctioned dispossession have resulted in historically concrete
state formations based upon highly uneven geographies (Gonza lez,
2003; Gonza lez, Bolívar and Va
zquez, 2002; Pizarro and Bejarano,
2003). Moreover, Democratic Security policies carried out during
the government of former president Alvaro  Uribe Ve lez
(2002e2010) constituted a militarized regime based on coercion
and the mobilization of fear that were effectively installed by
imaginaries of state weakness and omission. Narratives of the dire
need for a strong-handed state that could finally impose the rule of
law became a powerful trope through which repeated human
rights violations were justified and normalized. The country's
recent history speaks of the perverse consequences of desires for
the state and of the myth of its absence.
The idea of the return of the state, therefore, is as much
revealing as it is obscuring. The particular case of the Colombian
Caribbean accounts for the central role of the state in our under-
standing of climate adaptation and mitigation as forms of gover-
nance. As such, they constitute important regimes for the
regulation of life and the formation of governable subjects and
natures (Watts, 2015). The ambivalent desires for and experiences
of climate interventions in the Colombian Caribbean region also
reveal the arbitrary nature of the state. This is particularly evident
in the production of different forms of dispossession in the name of
a resilient future. Such forms of dispossession hint to the need to
understand its gradual and ordinary dimensions, and pay closer
attention to the spatial reconfigurations it entails (Ojeda, 2016). We
thus draw from studies of violence that focus, not just on extraor-
dinary and disruptive events, but on the multiple ways in which
violence get inscribed in everyday life (Coronil & Skurski, 2006;
Das, 2007; Jimeno, 1998).
We did not intend to generalize that adaptation and mitigation
are, per se, mechanisms for the production of dispossession. Rather,
we showed in this paper that when these globally informed in-
terventions met the specific local configurations of society, space
and environment in the Colombian Caribbean region, they pro-
duced contradictory outcomes. From this perspective, this paper
highlights the importance of considering the local specificities of
the global climate crisis, as well as the problematic effects climate
change policies and interventions can have over local populations
(Carey, French, & O'Brien, 2012; Coronado & Dietz, 2013; De Wit,
2015; Grove, 2014; Osborne, 2013). As Paprocki (2015) observes
in the case of Bangladesh, narratives of climate change often
obscure and depoliticize the regional histories and political econ-
omies that have made people and landscapes vulnerable. In both
Southern Atla ntico and Montes de María, promises of a resilient
future never addressed the historical vulnerability of rural families.
This statement leads us to our final conclusion: adaptation and
mitigation in the Colombian Caribbean region are far from being
real mechanisms that guarantee a viable life under the pressures of
global climate change. Rather, adaptation and mitigation have been
conduits for the reproduction of capital and of the uneven geog-
raphies of processes of state formation in the region.
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