(iPoster) Governance Structures and Environmental Policies in the Colombian Amazon

• In Event: Poster Session: Judicial Politics & Public Administration
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Public Administration

Abstract

Institutional changes resulting from the change of democratic governments have led to the inclusion of new public problems on government agendas. Some issues are recurrent due to their nature, severity, scope, and consequences for contexts and people. Environmental issues are currently a regular part of the agendas promoted by international organizations and have consequently influenced the formulation of development plans, public policies, and multilateral cooperation programs, among others. This process has succeeded in mitigating some of the effects of climate change and environmental crimes, and to some extent in committing countries with higher levels of development to reduce greenhouse gases and finance actions to protect biomes such as the Amazon.

The dialogue between different actors at the international level, as well as the promotion of new national agendas that seek to generate alternatives to address environmental problems, have led to the configuration of regional cooperation spaces. In such spaces, discussions are being held on the possibility of building new forms of joint work, not only at the national level but particularly at the decentralized level of Latin American countries. Special attention is being paid to border areas and ethnic communities. Therefore, the Amazon is considered a biome of special interest at the regional level.

Regarding governmental changes, Colombian society chose a leftist political option in the last presidential election for the period 2022-2026. This political shift has permeated the understanding of various public issues such as, among others, the preservation, care, and importance of environmental issues. This is evident in the formulation of the National Development Plan 2022-2026 "Colombia World Power of Life", the design of the new Security, Defense and Citizen Coexistence Policy "Guarantees for Life and Peace 2022-2026" and, in the international arena, in the proposals expressed by President Gustavo Petro at the Amazon Summit "United for our forests", in Belém do Pará, Brazil.

The above-mentioned public policy instruments, as well as the possible articulations derived from the Amazon Summit, are relevant references for analyzing the national government's position on the care and preservation of the environment, especially the Amazon. Of course, their relevance is not limited to the planning of government actions but lies in the definition of new - seemingly innovative - ways to ensure governance in territories and the security of environmental assets. In other words, the promotion of environmental security as a conceptual and practical dimension to guide government action is understood as the intersection between different interests, capacities, and resources or, as referred to by Aguilar (2010), the governance of public affairs.

In coherence with the above generalities, the research question that guides the development of the research is: how are the notions of governance and environmental security incorporated in the articulation of the National Development Plan 2022-2026 "Colombia World Power of Life" and the Security, Defense, and Citizen Coexistence Policy "Guarantees for life and peace 2022-2026"? Now, in the methodological dimension, this research is framed in qualitative studies. The type of research applied is exploratory-descriptive and, as for the sources of information, documentary sources and text analysis with the MAXQDA tool were mainly used.

Author

• Diego Davila, Universidad Santo Tomás