ABSTRACT
Flooding can produce different meanings and narratives for different groups of people, especially for ethnic communities that have developed their livelihoods around fluctuating rivers and wetlands. High modernism paradigms brought to Latin America by US experts during the 1950s to tame unruly rivers, obscured ethnic narratives and treated flooding as a catastrophic event that needed to be controlled to make progress. As a result, big dams, levees and drainage structures were built, changing the landscape and river dynamics. Consultancy teams from the Netherlands brought a new paradigm to Colombia to manage floods in 2012 as part of the concept of ‘making space for the river’. The new conception allowed for hidden narratives related to flooding and human relationship to rivers and wetlands to surface during the implementation of this paradigm. Through an ethnographic case study, we compare narratives around flooding from Afro-Colombian communities and sugarcane landowners. We argue that differential environmental citizenship rights formed under the high modernism paradigm prevented marginalised groups from being equal participants with more powerful actors. We argue that these disparities and power inequalities hampered the materialisation of the new paradigm and prevented alternative narratives on the flooding issue to be embraced in the region.
