Public Culture
Adaptive Publics:
Building Climate Constituencies
in Bogotá
Austin Zeiderman
In May 2013, the mayor of Bogotá, Gustavo Petro,
announced his intention to revise the city’s master plan.1 The Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial, or POT for short, had undergone minor revisions since it
was established in 2000, but nothing on the scale Petro had in mind. The city
council initially refused to discuss the proposal, leading Petro to pass it by decree.
This infuriated his longtime adversaries, who promptly iled suit. A judge sympathetic to the opposition suspended the plan, and over a year later it was still hung
up in court. While various dimensions of the proposal provoked discontent, one
proved especially incendiary: Petro’s desire to reorganize the master plan around
climate change. In the words of a critic, though his supporters would agree, the
mayor’s goal was to make adaptation “the core principle guiding the planning of
the city” (Behrentz 2013).
I am grateful to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for supporting this collaboration and to
LSE Cities for facilitating it. My thanks go especially to Eric Klinenberg for inviting me to participate and for his editorial guidance. Nikhil Anand, Gökçe Günel, Andrew Lakoff, Robert Samet,
Jerome Whitington, and two anonymous reviewers generously commented on the article or the ideas
within it. An earlier version was presented at the Institute for Public Knowledge, New York University, where I received invaluable feedback. In Bogotá, my gratitude goes to Laura Astrid Ramírez for
her research assistance and to Juan David Ojeda and Andrés Romero for allowing me to accompany
them in their work. Without Germán Durán’s logistical help, Bogotá’s quebradas would have been
inaccessible. Some of the names of those quoted in the text were changed to protect their anonymity,
and all translations from the Spanish are my own.
1. The Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial (POT) is the set of rules and regulations that determines
much of what can and cannot be done within the municipal boundaries. At least in theory, the POT
designates areas in which the city can expand, identiies zones to be protected, dictates the relationship between the city and the surrounding region, controls the use of land by different sectors, and
establishes guidelines for public transportation, parks, utilities, schools, and hospitals.
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Petro began his political career with the left-wing M-19 and spent two years in
prison before participating in the militant group’s demobilization. Once elected to
the House of Representatives and eventually the Senate, he became a key opponent of the conservative political establishment. Petro made a name for himself
as a iery critic of corruption, persistently condemning the intimate relationship
between elected politicians, drug trafickers, paramilitary forces, and other private
interests. As mayor of Bogotá from 2012 to 2015, he expanded his political horizons: in his irst year in ofice, he became an outspoken advocate of the imperative to adapt to the changing climate. This represented a sharp change, since until
recently Bogotá was considered to be lacking an adaptation strategy.2 In contrast, Petro’s (2012) position was remarkably unambiguous for a political leader:
“Global warming is irreversible. The damage is done, and we can’t undo it. It may
be possible to slow it down. But if we don’t do something now, we’re all dead.”
The mayor’s attention to climate change has angered many, especially those
who saw Bogotá’s future through the lens of capital investment, and his revised
master plan was a lightning rod for criticism. Though he did not achieve all of his
goals, he clearly raised climate change to the top of the political agenda. Despite
a cloud of uncertainty hanging over city hall — Petro’s opponents tirelessly sought
to remove him from ofice — his administration took action. The municipal agency
that once specialized in disaster prevention and response was given the broad
mandate of climate change adaptation. Along with a new title, the District Institute
for Risk Management and Climate Change (Instituto Distrital de Gestión de Riesgos y Cambio Climático, or IDIGER) was promoted within the city’s governance
structure and given a budget commensurate with its elevated importance. This
allowed the agency to begin implementing a range of adaptation initiatives: from
early warning systems and participatory budgeting workshops to bioengineering
experiments and watershed management plans. Based on recent ieldwork within
IDIGER, and building upon long-term research in Colombia, this article examines
the new technopolitical responsibilities, capabilities, and collectivities accompanying these initiatives. It shows how the imperative to adapt to climate change
actively reconigures both urban infrastructures and politics in Bogotá.3
2. For a review of climate change adaptation and mitigation policies before Petro took ofice, see
Lampis 2013a.
3. Over a twenty-month period from August 2008 to April 2010, I conducted both ethnographic
and archival research in Bogotá on the politics of security and the government of risk. My speciic
focus was the ield of disaster risk management, in particular a municipal government program working to relocate households from what in the early 2000s had been designated zonas de alto riesgo,
or “zones of high risk.” I returned for follow-up visits of between one and two months in January
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In what follows, “adaptive publics” serves as a way to conceptualize the political constituency assembling around the problem of climate change in the city. The
article situates Bogotá’s recent experiments in urban climate governance within
the politics of security in late twentieth-century Colombia, whereby victimhood
and vulnerability are both targets of governmental intervention and frames of
political recognition. The article shows how these innovative adaptation strategies challenge notions of the “public” associated with the liberal democratic polities of North American and European cities. It argues that the politics of climate
change in Bogotá aims to link a redistributive economic agenda to the technical
project of adaptation in the service of a broad program of social inclusion. The
article’s analysis of interventions aimed at building social infrastructure throughout the city’s hydrological systems highlights a form of “metrological citizenship,” whereby the inclusion of the urban poor within the political community of
the city is predicated on (and enacted through) practices of measurement. While
urban politics in Latin America have long revolved around popular demands to
be counted, this article shows climate change adaptation to be the most recent
idiom in which claims to recognition-through-enumeration are being articulated.
However, looking ahead to the future, the political uncertainty plaguing Bogotá’s
adaptation agenda parallels the ecological uncertainty to which it responds.
From Endangered City to Resilient City
Throughout the 2000s, crime and violence in Bogotá dramatically decreased
and security steadily improved. Yet there was something paradoxical about this
change. Although the general atmosphere is now more relaxed, Bogotá remains,
to some degree, in the grip of Colombia’s violent past. It continues to be understood as an endangered city — that is, as a threat-ridden place.4 Though immediate
dangers have declined, a more general sense of endangerment remains. Colombia’s history of conlict, violence, and instability continues to orient both popular
sentiments and political rationalities toward the ultimate pursuit of security. Governmental authority, national unity, and social order are framed primarily in these
2012, December 2013, and August 2014. My objective during these visits was to understand how
techniques of disaster risk management had since merged with the imperative of climate change
adaptation.
4. Further elaboration on the concept of “endangerment” and on the relationship between histories of security in Colombia and contemporary urban politics and government in Bogotá may
be found in my book Endangered City: The Politics of Security and Risk in Bogotá (Zeiderman,
forthcoming).
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terms. The persistence of everyday concerns about insecurity has many implications. One is that democracy and security have been fused such that a number of
rights and entitlements have been reconigured by the imperative to protect life
from threat (Rojas 2009; Zeiderman 2013; cf. Goldstein 2012). Another is that
elected oficials across the political spectrum must position themselves within the
national security landscape, such that the moderate and radical Left seek to promote their own versions of security in order to prevent the Right from monopolizing this key political terrain (Villaveces Izquierdo 2002; Rivas Gamboa 2007;
Llorente and Rivas Gamboa 2004).
The constitutive relationship between politics and security has its parallel in
the domain of urban politics and government, in the relationship between the
state and the urban citizen, and in the formation of the city as a political community. Over the past two decades, a political consensus — a governing pact — has
formed around the imperative to protect vulnerable populations from threats of
both environmental and human origin.5 Risk management is accepted across the
political spectrum as a governmental framework that can encompass a range of
objectives. Interventions throughout the urban periphery have focused on reducing
vulnerability, mitigating risk, and protecting life in order to deal with problems
as diverse as informality, criminality, and marginality (Zeiderman 2015). In risk
management, a series of mayoral administrations with varying political commitments and different visions for the future of Bogotá have found an ostensibly neutral, “postpolitical” way to address the social and environmental problems of the
urban periphery and to build a political constituency among the urban poor. This
has enabled left-of-center administrations to articulate a progressive approach to
security that insulates them from the conservative establishment’s efforts to criminalize, persecute, or annihilate anything resembling radical ideology. The politics
of security in late twentieth-century Colombia has set the parameters by which
urban life can be governed and lived.
Responses to climate change in contemporary Bogotá emerge out of this history. For it has shaped how progressives like Petro pursue a viable political idiom
in which to govern. Like disaster risk management before it, climate change adaptation is a platform from which to address a range of political objectives. Reverberations of longer histories of insecurity are also evidenced by the current emphasis
5. There is academic and political debate in Colombia over the right deinition and measurement
of “vulnerability.” For a review of these debates in the context of climate change adaptation, see
Lampis 2013b.
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on adaptation over mitigation.6 Organized around categories of “victimhood” and
“vulnerability” and the identiication of threat and danger, security and adaptation share a common logic. The concept of “resilience,” now irmly established in
the lexicon of government in Bogotá, also makes intuitive sense in this context;
if “endangerment” indexes the condition of existence whereby threats of human
and nonhuman origin are always looming, then “resilience” names the capacity to
withstand them or to bounce back after they materialize. There are other reasons
why adaptation and resilience are favored over mitigation at the present moment in
Bogotá.7 But this orientation is shaped fundamentally by the horizon of security
and risk that structures politics and governs everyday life in Colombia. The endangered city slides easily into the resilient city.
That said, Petro and members of his administration often deied the adaptation/
mitigation dichotomy by articulating the dual beneits of any single initiative. In
scientiic and policy discourses, there is a general shift toward recognizing the
positive feedback loops that link mitigation and adaptation, and in Bogotá new
urban policies were justiied on similar grounds (Bulkeley 2013). Densiication of
the city center is one example: the goal of cutting emissions from motorized transport by moving people closer to their jobs was linked to the objective of reducing
the number of people living in areas vulnerable to environmental hazards on the
urban periphery.8 In climate change, Petro found a political discourse that could
unify a broad range of policies and plans for urban development.
In 2013 I returned to Bogotá to ind out more about this surge in climate change
politics. A number of people I spoke with discussed Petro’s concern for the risks
associated with extreme weather events and his support for the relocation of families living in “zones of high risk.” Around the same time, he issued a decree
ordering twelve thousand additional households to be resettled over three years.
This was a dramatic increase both in the scale of the relocation program and
6. It is important to note that, before Petro took ofice, climate change policy on the national and
municipal levels was focused almost exclusively on mitigation (Lampis 2013a).
7. Scientiic consensus on the irreversibility of climate change is one reason governments cite for
emphasizing adaptation over mitigation. Another is the moral argument that mitigation should be the
responsibility of the largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. Economic justiications also
support the decision to spend limited resources on initiatives that will save lives or prevent disasters
at home rather than those that will help the planet as a whole. The political expediency of adaptation
over mitigation is always an important factor. For a broader review of these issues, see Wamsler 2014.
8. Various mitigation goals have also been announced recently, such as the progressive reduction
of carbon emissions by 2020, 2038, and 2050 and the intention to increase the amount of the city’s
energy supply from alternative sources to 25 percent over the next thirty-ive years (El Tiempo 2013a).
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in the housing subsidy the municipal government would provide to each family
(now Col$45 million, or about US$16,000). Petro explained to the media that this
decision was long overdue. Thanks to inaction on the part of previous administrations, he said, “thousands of families have settled in immitigable high-risk
zones. Living in a zona de alto riesgo means an increased probability of death
due to environmental risks. . . . [Col$]45 million is the amount required to speed
up the process of relocation and completely undo a decade of delay in the city of
Bogotá” (El Tiempo 2013b). Petro was clearly committed to expanding the resettlement program in the self-built settlements of the urban periphery — to using
techniques of risk management to respond to the precarious living conditions of
those on the margins of Colombian society. But I wanted to hear directly from
those managing this program how they understood city hall’s new enthusiasm for
their work.
The program director conirmed what I had read in the newspapers: “The
budget for relocation has quintupled under Petro! Initially, we were in charge of
relocating about three thousand households annually, but this number has now
increased to ifteen thousand.” I then asked him why he thought Petro found this
program so important. He told me: “As you know, the guiding principle behind
our work is to save lives. This hasn’t changed. Everything else follows that principle. Petro knows that every four months or so we’re hit hard by heavy rains and
landslides. He’s got that clear. He says time and time again that he doesn’t want to
lose a single life in the zonas de alto riesgo.” Until this point we were on familiar
ground, and I told the director of the resettlement program that each of his predecessors had said the same thing. “But,” he retorted, “Petro understands what no
previous mayor of Bogotá has: that climate change is absolutely real and serious
and that what we’re doing here with the resettlement program could become the
foundation for a citywide strategy of adaptation.”
The municipal government’s position could be understood as an expansion
of established approaches to governing risk in Bogotá, whereby what began as
a relatively limited experiment was becoming a generalized strategy of urban
government. But the escalation of interventions in high-risk areas also signals a
shift in how these interventions were framed. What was once a way to protect poor
and vulnerable populations from regularly occurring disasters had morphed into
a citywide response to the potentially dire consequences of climate change. The
problem was no longer the relatively constant periodicity of the rainy season in
Colombia and its rather predictable effects in the city’s steep hillside settlements.
Petro recognized that global warming would increase the severity and frequency
of extreme weather events, thereby intensifying pressure on urban infrastructure
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and housing. The compounded uncertainty inherent to climate change meant that
existing techniques for governing risk in Bogotá were necessary but insuficient.9
This required not only expanding the resettlement program throughout the selfbuilt settlements of the urban periphery but also using this program as a guide for
how to plan, build, and govern the city as a whole.
Between Victimhood and Vulnerability
I went back to Bogotá in August 2014 to see how the politics of climate change
was playing out on the ground. My visit coincided with the Rio+20 Summit,
which followed the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development that
had taken place in 2012 in Brazil. For three days, Bogotá would play host to
high-level dialogues between scientists, policy makers, and nongovernmental
organizations from around the world. The delegates were expected to share their
knowledge and experience with climate change adaptation and mitigation. But
the international visitors, who traveled from as far as Egypt and China, were allocated a small amount of time relative to their local hosts. Capitalizing on Bogotá’s
global reputation as a “success story” for its innovations in urban governance, the
event’s organizers positioned themselves as leaders in the ield of climate change
adaptation. As such, the summit was an opportunity for Petro’s administration
to showcase its agenda, perhaps even to mobilize international support for the
revised master plan, which remained suspended.
I awoke early to get to the conference venue before the proceedings began.
During the taxi ride, I noticed something not terribly unusual in Bogotá: a line
of over ifty people waiting single ile outside a nondescript ofice building. Five
blocks later I passed a similar scene, except this time the line stretched down the
block and around the corner. I asked the taxi driver what was going on. It turned
out that each building housed a centro digniicar (a literal translation is impossible; digniicar means simply “to dignify”). These were centers set up after the
2011 passage of the Law of Victims and Land Restitution to house representatives
of the national and local government agencies responsible for protecting the rights
of and providing reparations to victims of violence. Since the 1960s, Colombia’s
armed conlict has caused an inordinate amount of death, destruction, and displacement. Those lined up were hoping to register or advance their claims to land
restitution. Waiting to be recognized as beneiciaries of a state that adjudicates
9. There is not space here to comment on the distinction between risk and uncertainty or on the
claim that there has been a global shift from the former to the latter in the domain of urban and environmental governance. These are topics I have analyzed extensively elsewhere.
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rights on the basis of victimhood, they were subjects of what Didier Fassin and
Richard Rechtman (2009) have called the “empire of trauma.”
I arrived at the summit in time to catch the mayor’s welcome address. His
message was plain: climate change, as he put it, is “killing the poor” (Caracol
Radio 2014). Petro’s speech was also an opportunity to take shots at the national
government’s housing policy. President Juan Manuel Santos had recently declared
his intention to build one hundred thousand new homes, mostly on the periphery
of Colombian cities, and give them away to members of the urban poor who were
also victims of armed conlict (a beneit accessed at the centers I had just passed).
The national government’s housing policy conlicted directly with Petro’s plan
for densiication. The mayor’s goal was to build new housing in the city center for
people currently living on the edges of the city, especially vulnerable populations
at “high risk” for landslide and looding. What Petro did not emphasize in his
opening remarks was the common ground he and the president shared. Despite
their disagreement over where, when, and how new housing should be built, both
proposals forged a connection between plans for the city and the lives (and deaths)
of the urban poor.
This unremarked congruence reveals the degree to which the politics of security sets the conditions of possibility for everything from climate change adaptation to housing policy. But there were two important differences between the
competing visions. Santos’s plan understood the poor as actual victims, while
Petro’s alternative saw them as potential victims (in other words, as vulnerable),
and while the former focused on the past threat of armed conlict, the latter targeted the future threat of climate change. These distinctions notwithstanding,
both politicians — despite their professed opposition — emphasized threats to life
and positioned the victim and the vulnerable as the unassailable moral subjects
of Colombian politics and as the deserving recipient of the state’s oficial beneicence. The categories of victimhood and vulnerability shape the ield of governmental intervention for climate change adaptation in Bogotá.
Adaptive Publics
The rest of the Rio+20 Summit was a platform for the Petro administration to
showcase its climate change agenda. Details of that agenda are discussed below.
The overarching message communicated to the audience was the goal of assembling a political constituency through the imperative of adaptation. Everyone I
heard speak onstage, everyone I talked to face-to-face, seemed to agree: the city
government’s guiding mission, and in particular that of IDIGER, the newly cre-
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ated risk management and climate change agency, was to build a public around
the goal of adapting to a decidedly unpredictable and potentially violent urban
ecological future.
That said, the term lo público did not igure prominently in these discussions.
This fact should not be overlooked. Better yet, it should be cause to consider some
of the problems involved in focusing the lens of “publics” on climate politics in
Bogotá. A critical approach to such concepts is surely necessary when dealing
with what postcolonial scholars have shown to be societies perpetually divided
between those who belong to the imagined collectives of liberal democracy and
those who do not (Chatterjee 2011; Chakrabarty 2000). In Latin American cities,
categories like the “citizenry,” the “public,” and the “commons” have often competed with other notions of the body politic and have long been internally stratiied
along lines of race, ethnicity, gender, education, language, sexuality, class, and
religion (Sabato 2001; de la Cadena 2000). A similar point can be made about the
linear privatization narratives central to critiques of neoliberalism and their supposed reversal in a “post-neoliberal” era (Yates and Bakker 2013; Bakker 2013).
Again, the category of “public” often occludes more than it reveals.
Caution is even more warranted when we recognize that for those on the margins of civil society, liberal democratic institutions and ideals are often circumscribed by and subordinated to other rationalities of rule (Chatterjee 2004). Many
uses of “publics” as an analytical frame begin with a rather taken-for-granted
notion of democracy. One example would be science studies scholars, who sometimes commit this error even as they rethink democracy in order to make room
for nonhuman things.10 For they often fail to engage with histories and geographies of “disjunctive democracy,” as Teresa Caldeira and James Holston (1999:
692) call it, “where the development of citizenship is never cumulative, linear, or
evenly distributed for all citizens, but is always a mix of progressive and regressive elements, uneven, unbalanced, and heterogeneous.” Automatically resorting
to notions like “publics” limits our ability to think through the politics of climate
change in decidedly illiberal or nondemocratic circumstances. This is no doubt the
case in places like Colombia, where political liberalism has always been contested
10. Bruce Braun and Sarah Whatmore (2010: xiv) note that science studies scholars could beneit from greater precision in their political analyses: “Citizenship, democracy, representation, and
politics are constantly invoked in [the science and technology studies (STS)] literature, [yet] it is not
always clear to what these terms refer, which traditions in political theory inform them, or where
these traditions might need revision.” Noortje Marres’s (2012) work is an example of recent attempts
to deepen the exchange between STS and political theory by inquiring further into the role of materiality in politics and democracy.
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and incomplete. Perhaps the same concern applies even to the “advanced” liberal
democracies of Europe and North America.
If not in the idiom of “publics,” how was the imperative to create a political constituency around climate change adaptation imagined and discussed in
Bogotá? More prevalent were collective categories such as la gente (the people),
la comunidad (the community), la población (the population), and lo popular
(the popular). These categories were often foregrounded in political discourse,
pointing to the populist orientation of climate change adaptation in Bogotá. If the
“public” was invoked, it was when Petro and other members of his party talked
about la alianza público-popular (the public-popular alliance). Here the state is
synonymous with the “public,” and the political constituency it seeks to mobilize
is the “popular.” It’s tempting to understand climate politics in Bogotá as populist — that is, as a politics based on the will of “the people” as the “rightful source
of sovereign authority” (Samet 2013: 526).
Nevertheless, there are good reasons to adopt “publics” as an analytical lens
while recognizing the potential problems involved in doing so. Central to Petro’s
adaptation agenda was the goal of addressing a fragmented and somewhat privatized urban infrastructure. For example, the city’s water supply, sewage, and drainage systems were run by a public agency, but that agency contracted out much of
the construction and management of infrastructure to private irms, which maintained it unevenly across the city. Starting with drainage (or garbage, actually, but
that’s another story), Petro wanted the city’s vital systems brought back fully under
public management, or rather into an arrangement whereby the city government
partnered with neighborhood associations (here again, the “public-popular alliance” was invoked). Thinking through “publics” highlights the degree to which
adaptation in Bogotá aimed to reorient spaces of urban collective life around the
common good.
This, in turn, directs our attention to questions of rights and citizenship. On
many occasions in Bogotá (and on Twitter), I encountered the slogan ¡El cambio
climático es un hecho, adaptación es un derecho! — “Climate change is a fact,
adaptation is a right!” What a few years earlier might have been framed as the
“right to the city” was now expressed as the right to a city adapted to future (climate) uncertainty. “Citizenship” (in this securitized form) was the idiom within
which the rights and responsibilities of adaptation were discussed.
Another reason to conceptualize the politics of climate change in Bogotá
through the lens of “publics” has to do with the boundaries of political discourse
in Colombia. As Robert Samet (2013: 526) observes: “The term populism has
decidedly negative overtones. To call someone a ‘populist’ is to accuse him or
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her of pandering to ‘the masses,’ whipping up anti-institutional fervor, and using
social unrest for personal political gain.” Populist is a damning word in Colombian political discourse regardless of whatever analytical neutrality it may have
for social scientists and is automatically how Petro’s opponents characterized his
initiatives. It immediately draws connections to clientelism, patronage, and corruption, delegitimizing its participants as delusional masses irrationally following
a charismatic leader (cf. ibid.). The analytical category of “publics,” however, is
less freighted.
Finally, “publics” facilitates comparison, not in the sense of searching for equivalence but rather of thinking across difference. Approaching issues of adaptation
in Bogotá through this lens offers points of connection with cities elsewhere, both
North and South. In the following sections, “adaptive publics” refers to the hybrid
collectives assembling around the problem of climate change adaptation in the city
and the technical and political projects they are pursuing or that are being pursued
in their name. I discuss some of Bogotá’s new adaptation initiatives, highlighting
the key conceptual and practical issues they present. Each, I argue, contributes to
the creation of a new political constituency, an “adaptive public.” But the public
assembled around the problem of climate change, in contrast to the public of liberal democratic theory, is predicated on threats to life, stratiied by categories of
vulnerability and victimhood, and summoned by promises of protection.
Hydrosocial Infrastructure
Since Petro was elected mayor, one of city hall’s key objectives was to foster
“social infrastructure” in the self-built settlements of the urban periphery. Special
priority was given to areas adjacent to hydrological features, such as wetlands,
canals, rivers, drains, and ravines. The stated goal was to reduce concentrated
vulnerability among the urban poor by strengthening their collective capacity
to manage the risks associated with climate change. Participación popular, or
“popular participation,” was its guiding principle.
In late 2013, I attended a launch event for the Red Social de Gestión de Riesgo,
or the Social Network of Risk Management. The event was held at Bogotá’s
main convention center and hosted by IDIGER. Present were voluntary associations of all sorts, some of which were Juntas de Acción Comunal (Community
Action Councils, the lowest level in the city’s governance structure), while others
were neighborhood organizations focused on the environment, culture, or security. Over a thousand people took part, most of them inhabitants of the self-built
settlements of Bogotá’s urban periphery. The day began with a general assem-
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bly, in which IDIGER’s director, Javier Pava, outlined the program. A series of
workshops followed on themes ranging from participatory risk management and
community-based vulnerability assessment to grassroots environmental education and bottom-up solid waste reduction. Group leaders spoke about organizing
in their neighborhoods, about working in both partnership with and resistance
to IDIGER, and about what others could learn from their experiences. These
were the self-appointed spokespeople for the adaptive public. Though they did
not speak with one voice — in fact, disagreements arose over how best to manage
risk and reduce vulnerability — they consistently took a critical but collaborative
stance relative to the municipal government’s adaptation agenda.
The overarching themes of the event were popular participation and autogestión (self-governance). These values sat in tension with the fact that most of the
participants (even some children accompanying their parents) were wearing jackets, hats, and bandanas emblazoned with IDIGER’s name and logo. However, this
did not stop many neighborhood leaders from denouncing the city government’s
relocation program for households in “zones of high risk” or from proposing their
own alternatives. Again, the members of the adaptive public participating in this
event positioned themselves as both belonging to and critical of the oficial adaptation program. Even when disparaging IDIGER, they were applauded vigorously
by invited participants and government oficials alike. As the day progressed and
strategies were shared, contact information exchanged, and potential collaborations discussed, calling this a “social network” of risk management began to make
sense. Compared to the heavily technocratic approach to governing risk I had
seen a few years before, the objective of creating a political constituency around
climate change — an adaptive public — stood out.
The Rio+20 Summit took place nearly a year after this launch. One of my
reasons for attending the later event was to see whether anything initiated at the
earlier one had materialized. To ind out what had become of the “social network”
of risk management, I sat down with Priscila, one of the creators of IDIGER’s
Community Initiatives Program. She explained to me that the program began in
2012 as “a way to work directly with the comunidades de base [grass roots], to
encourage participation from the bottom up. The objective is convocarlos a todos
[to bring together, or summon, everyone] to do something about risk.” She told
me, “Adaptation is impossible without the communities. They can organize themselves and make their own decisions, but they also require close accompaniment
to organize in an adequate — that is, an adaptive — manner.”
The Community Initiatives team, Priscila said, supports this approach. It works
to ind synergies between the activities of existing social organizations adjacent
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to waterways and the broader goal of climate change adaptation. Her team starts
by offering training in capacity building before getting into exercises designed to
identify threats, risks, and vulnerabilities. An IDIGER representative eventually
discloses a budget set aside for the group (somewhere around Col$200 million,
or about US$70,000) to conduct remediation works. The organization has to contribute Col$20,000 or about US$7,000, but in-kind donations are encouraged (use
of a meeting room, for example). Throughout the process, IDIGER staff members
help the group to formulate a plan, allocate the budget, and contract workers —
that is, to become an adaptive public.
“What sort of concrete initiatives have been done thus far?” I asked. Priscila
responded: “Since climate change is upon us, we have to make sure the streams
and canals are in the best possible condition. So we clear out and reforest areas
surrounding bodies of water, working with communities so they don’t go back
and put more solid waste or rubble into the system.” She then went on to deine
infrastructure as a hydrosocial system: “The canal is not just a physical thing — it’s
also made up of people, and with a bit of support we ind that the community
organizes around it to monitor the water level, to clear out debris, to work together
on these sorts of problems but also on others that have less to do with the canal,
with infrastructure, or with adaptation.” The maxim “people as infrastructure”
(Simone 2004) was implicit.
Priscila was describing a process by which the ideas introduced at the 2013
event — social networks, hydrosocial infrastructures — were put into practice.
Implicit was the fact that IDIGER’s training sessions communicated to community groups the need to organize around the collective condition of vulnerability
and the overarching imperative of climate change adaptation. By doing so, these
groups could enter into partnerships with municipal government, making them
subcontractors rather than simply beneiciaries. Responsibility was devolved to
individuals, households, and communities. Yet it was also through this process that
people on the margins of society could belong to a political constituency. In return,
they beneited from a novel form of distribution-via-adaptation, whereby public
funds designated for climate change responses are put directly in the hands of
those at the bottom of the political system and the social order (cf. Ferguson 2015).
Metrological Citizenship
To better understand this process, I accompanied the Community Initiatives team
on a number of recorridos (tours or rounds). One cold, rainy Saturday morning,
we traveled to a low-income neighborhood called Nueva Delhi on Bogotá’s far
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southeastern edge. We were greeted by the head of the local junta, who welcomed
everyone with a round of coffee from the corner bakery. The purpose of today’s
exercise, he announced, was to unite those committed to organizing an intervention in the adjacent quebrada (ravine).11 He introduced Tomás from IDIGER.
After providing some background on his agency’s coordinating role within the
city’s climate change adaptation efforts, Tomás got down to business. He went
around the room, appointing each person a category of object to measure or count
(square meters of stream edges to be reinforced, cubic meters of garbage to be
removed, number of trees to be felled). Once duties were assigned, the group took
off on foot. We ascended until the sidewalks turned to dirt tracks and the houses
gave way to dense thickets of alpine scrub.
We spent the rest of the day — close to eight hours total — traversing the quebrada from top to bottom (see ig. 1). Dropping nearly a thousand feet in elevation,
the group paused every few minutes to measure an area of erosion, count leaking
water supply pipes, or register an illegal dumpsite. The team worked tirelessly to
construct a systematic inventory, which they carefully recorded in their Social
Network of Risk Management notebooks. The data gathered would eventually
be incorporated within the oficial adaptation strategy for the area and guide the
distribution of resources for speciic projects.
These acts of measurement can be understood as acts of citizenship, since
the collection of data is also the assembly of a certain kind of public. Tomás
assigned responsibility to each person to count something, and it was through
these counts that they could themselves be counted as members of a political
constituency — in this case, one organized around the imperative of climate change
adaptation. Expanding upon Andrew Barry’s (2011) “metrological regimes,” this
is an expression of something we might call “metrological citizenship,” whereby
political recognition and entitlement are predicated on (and enacted through)
performances of enumeration, quantiication, calculation, and measurement (cf.
Appadurai 2012; Townsend 2015). Barry (ibid.: 274) insists that metrology is
not antithetical to politics: “Measurement and calculation do not only have antipolitical effects.” After all, being counted as a member of the public is one of the
basic procedures of liberal democracy. But there is nothing necessarily liberal
about the politics of metrology (cf. Schnitzler 2008). The constitutive relationship
between recognition and measurement in metrological regimes (whether liberal or
11. Quebradas are essentially ravines, but due to Bogotá’s rainfall patterns they are rarely (if
ever) dry. Since the local usage of the term implies a body of water as much as a landform, I will
mostly retain the Spanish name.
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illiberal, democratic or populist) sets the boundaries of the body politic and shapes
struggles over inclusion and exclusion.
The Quebrada and Its Public
During these recorridos, new political ecologies came to life. The groups gathered together were united by the quebrada. Their participants were not from the
same junta or even the same neighborhood, but from opposite sides of the ravine,
from different juntas, from a range of community organizations. Stopping frequently, the group grew as it descended, doubling in size by the end of the day.
The quebrada was assembling a political constituency that differed from any that
existed before the exercise began.12
Yet hard political work was still to come. Before an intervention could begin,
the group had to designate one organization legally responsible. Dificult ques12. Recent work in STS is helpful for understanding such processes. In the introduction to a particularly generative set of articles, Marres and Javier Lezaun (2011: 491) outline an approach to the
study of politics that “queries how objects, devices, settings and materials, not just subjects, acquire
explicit political capacities, capacities that are themselves the object of public struggle and contestation, and serve to enact distinctive ideals of citizenship and participation.”
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Figure 1 A quebrada
cutting through a hillside
on Bogotá’s southern
periphery. Photograph by
the author, 2013
Public Culture
Public Culture
tions arose about how best to organize, socially and politically, in order to execute
the project: Who speaks on behalf of the group? Who is in and who is out? Does
the quebrada itself have any say? If not, who should adjudicate the rights and
resources now attached to it? The gender imbalances endemic to neighborhoodlevel politics in Bogotá were front and center. The junta leaders were predominantly men, whereas the women present mainly represented voluntary, issuebased organizations. When Gladys, the spokeswoman for an environmental group,
challenged Don Orlando, the president of the junta, in his bid for the leadership
role, she was told: “Why don’t you just participate as an individual, as a citizen, as
a member of the community adjacent to the quebrada? There’s no need for your
whole organization to get involved.” Gladys would not be sidelined. Her questioning persisted until the group agreed that Don Orlando’s junta would be named
on the paperwork, but all decisions would be made collectively and horizontally.
At the center of these negotiations was the quebrada. Due to its unconventional
political geography — it conformed neither to an existing jurisdiction nor to an
established institutional form — the quebrada disrupted customary relations of
authority and reconigured familiar territorial arrangements. Without ascribing
autonomous, intentional agency to the nonhuman world, we can nevertheless say
that the quebrada politicized people and place in new ways. Its ability to assemble
a public was enhanced, of course, by the fact that money was involved. But there
was an affective dimension to the action the quebrada inspired.
In some cities, like Medellín, quebradas are spaces of conlict and danger.
Separating one neighborhood from another, they have often served as battleields for warring paramilitary groups or drug cartels. Clashes lare up, shootouts
go down, and bodies are dumped there. People have learned to fear and avoid
them. Bogotá’s quebradas have never had quite the same stigma, but people still
approach them with caution. They are believed to shelter drug addicts, thieves, the
homeless, and others on the urban margins.
But as security in urban Colombia has improved, people in the hillside settlements abutting quebradas have begun to see these “no-go zones” in a different
light. Feeling safe to traverse them again — albeit always accompanied and only
during daylight hours — residents of the urban periphery have started imagining
new relationships with the waterways bisecting their neighborhoods. They are
also attuned to shifts in governmental priorities and the openings and opportunities that accompany them. And many have irsthand experience with quebradas’
potential to overlow and cause damage if not properly maintained. As a result,
Bogotá’s quebradas are matters of concern around which a public has begun to
assemble.
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Although adaptation was actively reconiguring the politics of the urban periphery, this was not a smooth, fast, or seamless process. After all, when concrete
entitlements are at stake, metrological politics often involves contentious debates
over who and what should be counted. The adaptive public was heterogeneous and
fragmented. There were tensions between competing metrics — disputes over how,
when, and where measurements should be done. On one survey, some participants
ixated on recently built shacks perched on the edge of the ravine. They marked
down the location of the shacks, noted that they were discharging sewage directly
into the stream, and began to inquire about their occupants, who were identiied
as recent arrivals of modest means and unknown pedigrees. Implied was the need
to relocate, or perhaps evict, them. A faction within the group objected on the
grounds that they should be consulted, not displaced. Ultimately, these households were counted, but as part of the problem rather than as part of the political constituency empowered to solve it. The politics of metrology can assemble
a participatory, democratic public; it can also slide in the direction of illiberal,
vigilante justice.
Early Warnings
Metrological citizenship was deepened during IDIGER workshops in which
residents were trained to participate in the city’s early warning systems. These
workshops began with a conceptual discussion of the verb prevenir, which combines elements of “anticipation,” “foresight,” “warning,” and “prevention.” They
quickly got technical, covering rainfall meters, stream-low gauges, river-level
sensors, and weather monitoring stations. The immediate objective was to educate neighborhood groups on the city’s meteorological instruments and how their
measurements are communicated via text message. Using examples, the trainers
focused on how to interpret these alerts, when to take them seriously, and how to
warn others. The ultimate goal was to strengthen collective resilience by making
those living alongside waterways integral to the function of the city’s early warning system. At stake were issues of vulnerability and responsibility, both central
to the formation of an adaptive public.
Álvaro, an IDIGER technician, instructed the group: “You have to learn how
to read these alerts and know when they require serious action on your part. . . .
We’re not going to tell you that.” He gave an example: “You know that it’s been
raining heavily for the past few weeks and that the quebradas are illing up with
garbage and rubble, so you can assume that there’s a risk of looding. It could be
a quick, heavy rain (ive millimeters over ten minutes) or a slow, light one (ten
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millimeters over three hours), but since you know the quebrada, you know both
are potentially problematic.” After this lesson in vulnerability, Álvaro moved to
responsibility: “This is when you have to alert others in the community and start
taking preventive measures. We’re not always going to be able to come and save
you. Every citizen of Bogotá has to do his or her part.”
Like the practices of enumeration discussed above, these measurements belong
to the domain of political metrology. Fluency in the technical idiom of early warning systems is necessary for establishing one’s level of vulnerability and knowing
how to act accordingly. These are membership criteria for belonging to the public
assembled around climate change adaptation. When rights and responsibilities are
predicated on such information, entitlements depend on proiciency in meteorological measurement and monitoring.
Equipped with such data and the ability to interpret it, residents were presumed by IDIGER to share the responsibility of preparing for or responding to
emergencies. Incorporating people into the function of the early warning system
recognized the importance of intuitive, noncalculative knowledge for the anticipation of threat and the management of infrastructure. But this also enabled them to
make demands on or wage critiques of the government, for the data could be used
to hold authorities accountable for actual or potential climatic events. Metrological citizenship implies the ability to mobilize measurements in order to call for
the construction or repair of infrastructure in preparation for the next storm. It
involves pushing to be recognized as vulnerable in order to access the opportunities made available by adaptation.
Much of what we know about enumeration and urban politics comes from commentary on the beneits and dangers of “smart cities” in the global North (Kitchin
2014; Greenield 2013). Intelligent technologies, infrastructures, and buildings are
seen to require a population willing to relinquish ownership of sensitive personal
information and to acquiesce to values embedded with the design of the devices
themselves. Individual privacy and freedom are opposed to government surveillance and corporate control. When city dwellers enter the equation, it is as “hackers” or “citizen scientists” independently collecting data to demand public or private accountability (Townsend 2015). These analyses sit in tension with the politics
of metrology in Latin America, where urbanization and democratization have long
depended on popular demands to be counted by the state. For inhabitants of the
informal, self-built settlements of the urban periphery, political incorporation has
been predicated on enumeration and measurement. By demanding inclusion in oficial surveys, maps, and plans, and eventually street addresses, bus routes, and land
titles, they have fought to join the political community of the city.
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In Bogotá, climate change adaptation is the most recent idiom in which claims
to recognition-through-enumeration are being articulated. In the 1970s and 1980s,
inclusion was sought in terms of development, modernization, legalization, and
formalization. In the 1990s and 2000s, imperatives such as security, sustainability,
and disaster risk management took center stage. With the rise of climate politics,
struggles for urban citizenship now mobilize metrics associated with adaptation,
vulnerability, and resilience.
Budgeting Adaptation
With trainings completed, inventories conducted, and agreements signed, the
allocation of resources could begin. This is where the data collected during the
surveys described above would guide the distribution of funds for speciic interventions. To this end, IDIGER organized participatory budgeting workshops in
community meeting houses throughout neighborhoods adjacent to quebradas.
One took place in a single-room storefront with a roll-up metal door. Since the
interior space was too limited for the forty-odd attendees, plastic chairs spilled
out onto the sidewalk.
Equipped with laptop and projector, two IDIGER representatives, Álvaro and
Camila, introduced the exercise. A spreadsheet prepared specially for the workshop was beamed onto a blank white wall. The spreadsheet contained a column
of key roles, such as “general coordinator” and “accountant,” and one of sample
interventions: pruning bushes, ixing stream margins, extracting fallen trees, ixing plumbing leakages, and so on. Further down the list were cultural and educational activities, such as inauguration and closing celebrations, outreach events,
and mural painting workdays. Álvaro explained, “The question is: Which risks
do you want to invest in mitigating, and which are most likely to cause problems
in the future?” He then encouraged the group by predicting that they would be
more careful and effective with their intervention than a hired contractor. “This is
why city hall wants to work directly with you,” he stressed. “If we start from your
ideas, adaptation is more likely to succeed. The best way to reduce vulnerability
is by building knowledge and then converting it into practice.”
Guided by Álvaro, the group traversed the spreadsheet cell by cell. Consulting
the inventories recorded during their surveys, they called out measurements of the
amount of work needed in each category. Estimated costs for each line item were
tallied automatically. As totals accumulated at the bottom of the spreadsheet, the
exercise took on a more serious tone. Álvaro then unveiled the overall budget:
“We have allocated [Col$]214,790,014 . . . (about [US]$80,000) for this quebrada.”
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The adaptive public assembled now had to decide on the speciic interventions on
which these funds would be spent.
But the group also had to agree who among them was going to be hired to
perform the work. Tensions lared between those who spoke in the name of redistribution and those concerned about issues of accountability. Some argued that
everyone present should get a fair share. A few expressed concern about the junta
leadership distributing funds in exchange for political loyalty. Others wanted
assurances that the work would truly get done. Álvaro inally intervened: “There
will be full transparency and zero corruption.” Using a term that means “to regulate,” “inspect,” “control,” and “supervise” all at once, he said: “You can be sure
that we are going to iscalizar.”
In the truck on the way back to IDIGER headquarters, Álvaro and Camila
elaborated this point with candor. They told me that these initiatives, which were
still in their infancy, would undoubtedly be barraged by allegations of populism,
clientelism, and corruption. Camila foresaw members of the opposition demanding investigations by the Contraloría, Colombia’s Government Accountability
Ofice. But, Álvaro stressed, “there are just as many if not more thieves in private
companies with government contracts than among the community.” “Better to
put a small amount of resources in the hands of people whose lives are affected
by the problem,” he said, “than to put a large sum in the pockets of contractors
who have no stake in it whatsoever.” Regulating the process was necessary not
only to ensure results but also to buffer adaptation initiatives from the opposition’s
attempts to undo them.
Among those present, an irony was lost on no one: it was Petro himself, as
senator, who scrutinized and eventually uncovered extensive corruption in the city
government. His predecessor, Samuel Moreno, was ultimately jailed for his illegal
relationships and backroom deals with private contractors. By increasing public
awareness of corruption, Petro was partly responsible for creating the climate of
suspicion that now surrounded his administration. This added another dimension to the politics of vulnerability in Bogotá. Petro’s adaptation initiatives were
organized around the imperative to protect vulnerable lives but were themselves
vulnerable to being overturned by his political opponents.
An Uncertain Future
In recent years, Bogotá has clearly been the site of an innovative climate change
adaptation agenda. But that agenda faces serious challenges as it moves forward.
The vision for the future of Bogotá expressed by Petro’s administration fore-
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grounded adaptation within nearly all sectors of urban governance, planning, and
development: from densiication of the city center and alternative transportation
networks to social housing schemes and water management systems. It did so not
only to prepare the city for a future of ecological uncertainty but also to transform
the institutional structures that could lead to a more resilient Bogotá. As Daniel, a top-level IDIGER coordinator, explained, “resilience” for Petro was “a new
paradigm of governance that strengthens public instructions, reduces the inluence of the private sector, and challenges the tyranny of the market.” This upends
academic critiques that treat resilience and neoliberalism as homologous (Walker
and Cooper 2011). Here the logic is reversed: resilience is used to confront neoliberalism and the paradigm of market order on which it rests.13 Whether Petro succeeded is another matter. What’s signiicant is that he linked resilience to a broad
program of social inclusion that sought to bring essential urban services under
public management and to redistribute resources to the urban poor (cf. Ferguson
2010). This is not to say that adaptation was simply a means to a different end — a
social agenda in an ecological disguise — but that we must pay attention to what
it comes to mean and do at speciic conjunctures. Indeed, adaptation can be harnessed to a program of socioenvironmental change that refuses such dichotomies
altogether.
What this emerging politics of climate change will ultimately mean for Bogotá
depends on whether the broader political program underpinning it will have longevity. The adaptation initiatives discussed above may be ephemeral if they are
further compromised by legal battles in the courts and political skirmishes with
the city council. Will they all disappear into thin air now that Petro’s term has
come to an end and Enrique Peñalosa, one of his most persistent critics, has taken
his place? The political future of these adaptation initiatives is as uncertain as the
ecological future they confront (cf. Zeiderman et al. 2015).
The fact that the politics of disaster risk management of the 1990s and 2000s
enjoyed relative stability under a handful of different mayors, even some with
quite different approaches to governing the city, suggests that something similar
could be expected here. This seems all the more likely if we consider the historical
conjuncture in which the politics of adaptation has taken root in Bogotá. Whether
in the hands of Petro or his successor, climate change will remain a strategic way
of governing the urban poor and building a political constituency that responds
13. A similar point has been made by Stephen J. Collier and Andrew Lakoff (2015) in their
genealogy of “vital systems security.” They, too, suggest an alternative view of the emergence of
“resilience” and its political implications relative to neoliberalism.
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both to international pressures and priorities and to the politics of security on a
national level.
Even if these adaptation initiatives are soon disavowed or discarded, they nevertheless offer an important lesson about contemporary climate politics. In recent
years, philosophers and social theorists have declared the arrival of two new periods: the “postpolitical” and the “Anthropocene.” Some have argued that they are
interconnected and that climate change is one of the key domains in which the
postpolitical condition is produced and sustained (Swyngedouw 2010). It is easy
to ind evidence to support this argument. However, we must not foreclose the possibility that another climate politics is possible — one that identiies strategies for
radically reconiguring the unequal social and economic relations underpinning
the ecological crisis confronting the present.14
The politics of adaptation in Bogotá has such potential. There are currents
of thought within it that seek to respond to the dire consequences of climate
change with ambitious and transformative strategies of social transformation — for
example, reducing entrenched marginality and widespread economic inequality,
strengthening social infrastructure and collective resilience among vulnerable
communities, opening spaces of political debate and participation for previously
excluded sectors of society, making vital infrastructures work in the interest of
people rather than proit, and promoting democratic values of transparency, justice, and accountability. While powerful forces seek to derail these initiatives,
what is perhaps more dificult to suppress is the potential for the adaptation agenda
in Bogotá to stimulate experiments in climate politics elsewhere.
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Adaptive Publics
Public Culture
Published by Duke University Press