Producing nature and making the state: Ordenamiento territorial in the Pacific lowlands of Colombia Kiran Asher a , Diana Ojeda b, * ,1 a Department of International Development, Community, and Environment, Clark University, 950 Main Street, Worcester, MA 01610, USA b Graduate School of Geography, Clark University, 950 Main Street, Worcester, MA 01610, USA article info Article history: Received 9 October 2007 Received in revised form 19 August 2008 Keywords: Hegemony State Nature Territorial zoning Afro-Colombians Colombia abstract In this paper, we explore how ordenamiento territorial, a territorial zoning policy in the 1991 Colombian Constitution remakes nature and helps constitute the state in the ‘‘economically backward” but ‘‘biodi- versity rich” Pacific lowlands region. We draw on Gramscian insights on hegemony and the importance of conjunctures to trace how changes in the new Constitution and global biogeopolitics reconfigure nat- ure and state power through the mandates of sustainable development, economic growth, and the con- servation of biological and cultural diversity. Finally, we contribute to the literature on political ecology by showing how the political power of the state, nature, and capital are interwoven materially and sym- bolically in complex and contradictory ways. Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction In this paper a biologist-turned-social scientist, and a historian- turning-geographer argue that ‘‘nature” plays a key role in consti- tuting state hegemony. 2 Our argument is based on three sources. First, it draws on Asher’s field research on Afro-Colombian move- ments, economic development, and environmental conservation in the 1990s (Asher’s, forthcoming) and her contention that struggles for social change in the third world are shaped by and against the forces of the state and capitalist development. Second, it is informed by Ojeda’s work on the production of geographical knowledge in Colombia and its historical role in the articulation of an exclusionary socionatural order (Nieto et al., 2005a,b). Third, we take Gramsci’s (1971) insights into hegemony as the dialectics of coercion and con- sent as a point of departure to explore how ordenamiento territorial,a territorial zoning policy in the 1991 Colombian Constitution remakes nature and helps constitute the state in the ‘‘economically back- ward” but ‘‘biodiversity rich” Pacific lowlands region. 3 In doing so, we highlight Gramsci’s relevance for political ecology as a field of study that ‘‘seeks to understand the complex relations between Nat- ure and Society through careful analysis of social forms of access and control over resources” (Watts and Peet, 2004, p. 4). Also following Gramsci, we highlight the importance of the particular conjunctures of economic and geopolitical forces within which nature became a fundamental locus of state power and legitimacy. Indeed, the legitimacy of the post-independence Colombian state, its ability to meet the basic needs of its citizens, and its con- trol over the means of violence has been dubious. Over the course of the 20th century it achieved relative political stability by exclud- 0016-7185/$ - see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2008.09.014 * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: kasher@clarku.edu (K. Asher), dojeda@clarku.edu, dianaoje- da@gmail.com (D. Ojeda). 1 This is a coauthored article. The names of the authors are listed in alphabetical order. 2 By ‘‘nature” we do not mean something essential, pregiven or outside human relations and social history. Rather we concur with Williams (1983, p. 219) remarks that ‘‘nature” is among the most complex concepts in the English language and along with him and others (e.g., Cronon, 1996; Haraway, 1991, 1992; Latour, 1993, 2005) we understand that it as always already connected to humans, social relations, and history in multiple and dynamic ways. In the rest of the paper, we use the term ‘‘nature” without quotes to call the attention to (i) the ways in which rivers, mangroves, timber, frogs, land, tropical moist forests, genes, among other ‘‘nonhu- man” entities, become crucial for state formation in Colombia and, (ii) how, for this to happen, a wide range of socionatural assemblages get translated into a seemingly simple, common sense categories that form ‘‘the world out there”. A detailed analytical engagement with the term understood as a socionatural assemblage is beyond the scope of this paper (see e.g., Kaika and Swyngedouw, 2000; Swyngedouw, 2004). 3 In this paper, by ‘‘remaking nature” we mean the simultaneous material and symbolic (re)production of nature. We draw our readers’ attention to Moore’s work (1996, 2005). His insight that ‘‘Struggles over symbolic processes are conflicts over material relations of production, the distribution of resources, and ultimately power” (Moore, 1996, p. 127) drawn from Gramsci is instrumental to our understanding of the role that the production of nature plays in the state’s struggle for hegemony. See also Kosek (2006) and Neumann (1998, 2004) for productive ways of understanding the connections between nature and the state. See Smith (1984, 1996, 1998) on the production of nature; Braun (1997), Braun and Castree (1998), Castree (1995, 2000) and Katz (1998) for nuanced analyses on the material and symbolic dimensions of the production of nature. Geoforum 40 (2009) 292–302 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Geoforum journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum