Environmental History and Commons for the Colombian Caribbean Challenges

Abstract

Environmental history, as a field of analysis and transdisciplinary study, aims to explore the interactions between society and ecosystems from a deep understanding of how relationships between human groups and natural systems change over defined periods of time. This article seeks to delve into the environmental history of the savannahs of the Cesar department in Colombia, documenting the milestones in the privatization of the commons and the degradation of social–ecological systems. Methodologically, satellite images and aerial photographs are analyzed to determine the changes in land cover that reveal the state of the ecosystems, and an ethnographic approach is used to document the perception and valuation of local Afro-descendant communities in the region. The article shows how, over the last 60 years, land-use planning models have favored individual appropriation practices and agroindustrial models over collective forms of pastoralism and small-scale agrifood systems. It also documents the main socio-ecological impacts and the conflicts implicit in different tenure models that should be taken into account in the various public policies related to sustainability, peace building, and the recognition of territorial rights in the Colombian Caribbean.

1. Introduction

Throughout most of the 20th century and particularly during the consolidation phases of agricultural development models, the heterogeneity of ecosystems was seen as a problem for increasing production due to the difficulties in standardizing agroindustrial processes [1]. However, at the end of that same century, nature gained significance, and biodiversity conservation policies were included in Colombia’s land-use planning models [2,3]. However, by that time, the process of the transformation of terrestrial and marine ecosystems was already drastic [2,3], and the consequences for aquifer recharge areas and savannahs in the Colombian Caribbean were particularly adverse due to the degree of habitat transformation, deforestation and the loss of ecosystem services [2,3]. In Latin America, the transformation of natural ecosystems to agricultural cover at different scales is taking place in the context of climate change [2], with substantially adverse consequences for local communities and ethnic peoples.

The landscape in the inland regions of the Colombian Caribbean, also known as the dry Caribbean, changed from plains and tropical forests to agricultural scenes of cattle ranching, rice fields, cotton crops, oil palm plantations and other rural economic activities. With these changes, sometimes interrupted by armed conflict or favored by that same violence [4], rural societies were also transformed and adapted their ecosystem practices under conditions marked by the inequality of the agricultural modernization model, which has denied the value of the knowledge and practices of Afro-descendants and other local communities [5,6,7].

Based on an environmental history approach and the socio-ecological perspective of sustainability, this article examines the transformations in the social and natural systems of the savannah and floodplain areas of one of the main basins in the Caribbean, the Cesar River, with particular focus on the strip of the Valledupar region populated by Afro-descendants from six communities at the northern and southern ends of this rural area: Guachoche, Guacochito, Badillo, Los Venados, El Perro and Guaymaral. This is a watershed of great ecological importance due to its location in an intermediate valley between the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and the Serranía del Perijá (Figure 1). I will highlight the milestones in the privatization of common goods and the effects on the ecosystems and use practices of the communities, confronting the institutional models of territorial planning, especially in savannah and floodplain ecosystems, which are very characteristic of the Caribbean.

To this end, the significance of this process of change in the tenure and use of this territory is analyzed in a cross-cutting manner from the perspective of social–ecological systems (SES) [6], firstly, in terms of the state failing to protect the tenure rights of local communities and, secondly, considering the state’s permission of a new status quo that violates the communities’ previous rights and legally protects new occupants, despite contradicting the public goods regime established by the state itself for these territories. Thirdly, these historical changes in the forms of tenure and use are perceived by the local inhabitants as unjust since they are violent occupations or have been legitimized by property titles of controversial origin [4,8].

Historicizing the ecological and socio-cultural transitions of the study region is the basis for identifying sustainability challenges. In turn, the environmental history of the geographic valleys allows us to contribute other public policy approaches to the new time that is dawning in Colombia: peace building, which is a new wave of agrarian reform and a more sensitive approach to the reparation of historical injustices against Afro-descendant populations and other collectives. In this context, the questions guiding this article include the following: (i) How have the social–ecological systems of the Valledupar savannahs in the Colombian Caribbean been transformed in the period from 1980 to 2022? (ii) What are the ecological and cultural implications of the change from common property tenure systems to private regimes? (iii) Finally, what are the main sustainability challenges relevant to the new political and social moment in Colombia which, under a new government, seeks to shape a model of territorial planning, ecological transition, peace building and a restorative justice approach?

2. Theoretical Framework

2.1. Brief Historical References on Uncultivated Baldío Lands

Environmental history is the field of knowledge that inquires into the multiple ways in which human societies and nature have co-evolved, affecting and conditioning each other [9]. Despite growing literature from an ecosystemic approach and history focused on environmental conflict, little has been produced on the environmental history of Colombia in comparison to other approaches to national historiography [10,11]. Even so, there is a rising interest in analyzing land cover changes, transitions in use systems and other types of cultural and ecological spatiotemporal processes from a historical perspective [12], to the point that a Latin Americanist methodological approach to environmental history has been consolidated, including cartographic analysis, documentary sources, ethnographic approach and other descriptive instruments [13].

This situated approach to environmental history brings great theoretical and methodological challenges, especially because of the availability of sources that enable a long-term understanding of changes in coupled natural and social systems, rather than of each level separately. A recurrent challenge in the use of cartographic sources is the availability of satellite images or aerial photographs for periods of interest that can be discussed with documentary sources and confronted in the ethnographic field. For this research, for example, quality cartographic data are available since 2000 and cadastral sources since 1970.

A part of the explanation behind the environmental history of the commons in Colombia lies in its extensive regulation [14]. The areas under analysis in Valledupar have been considered for years as public lands or reserved wastelands known as baldíos where certain systems of use by local communities are allowed. Explicitly, the legislation states that:

“Islands, alluvial plains and dried-up riverbeds, lakes and swamps of national property may only be awarded to peasants and people engaged in fishing of scarce resources [...] in equal conditions, preference must be given to those who are peasants or people engaged in fishing occupants. In the communal savannahs and alluvial plains that are periodically flooded as a result of overflowing rivers, lagoons or swamps, no land acquisition programs shall be carried out. […] These areas constitute a territorial reserve of the State and are imprescriptible. They may not be subject to enclosures that tend to prevent the use of such lands by local residents.”

(Law 160 of 1994, Article 69)

This law of 1994 includes considerations on land under state control that have been developed since the Fiscal Codes of 1873 and 1912 [15], which inherited doctrines of colonial origin that considered a significant part of lands ancestrally occupied by pre-Hispanic peoples to be wastelands. Thus, the origin of the baldío as a colonial category is associated with the notion of terra nullius, adopted in the act of the Federation of the United Provinces of New Granada (1811) [15]. This act places under state control these supposed “uninhabited lands” or “deserted” lands, which would henceforth be classed as baldíos and, therefore, have no recognized linkage of tenure or use with a particular human community. Subsequently, the Constitution of New Granada of 1858 established for the first time that these so-called uninhabited lands and the resources of the subsoil were declared state property [15]. This legislative provision is expanded in Decree 2663 of 1994, which defines what should be understood by “playones” (alluvial plains), communal savannahs and other lands owned by the nation. These norms state that “communal playones are areas composed of baldío lands covered with natural pastures, which have traditionally been occupied with cattle herded in common by locals”.

That is to say that there is more than 400 years of conceptualization regarding what is considered public land, whether or not it is baldío, who should administer it, how it is regulated, what rights can be claimed over it, etc. However, two relevant historical events have interrupted the relatively homogeneous narrative on the state control of land. On the one hand, environmental and biodiversity considerations in ecologically significant areas have made the regulation of public-use goods stricter, especially since the 1970s, when the National Code of Natural Resources came into force in Colombia [16]. On the other hand, the consolidation of the rights of indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples introduced another legal order on land and common goods that are considered an integral part of their subjectivity. Thus, since the 1990s, Afro-descendants, in particular, have the possibility of requesting collective titling over ancestrally occupied lands, with some restrictions, including the fact that lands considered reserved baldíos cannot be titled. Over time, this consideration has become more flexible to the point that even insular areas have been recognized as collectively owned by Afro-descendants [17]. However, in Valledupar, the restriction continues, and the savannahs and playones are the state’s main claim to not recognizing collective titling rights for those who have historically lived there.

This regulatory account suggests that communal savannahs and playones are characterized by two conditions: biophysical and ecological characteristics and a historical, social and legal configuration based on their communal use. This means that the existence of these spaces depends not only on the conservation of their biological, edaphological and climatic conditions and elements but also on the common social use that the human groups who depend on them have established as a form of social organization and as a way of relating to the natural environment they inhabit. Thus, savannahs and communal playones exist to the extent that there are communities who have promoted their conservation and have contributed to their ecological configuration by means of common use practices [18,19].

Therefore, the current structure of these ecosystems is possible thanks to the human collectives who have carried out traditional occupation and use, preventing their degradation. Savannahs and playones cease to be communal when there are processes of private appropriation and enclosure, as is the case with the traditional lands that the communities of Valledupar are claiming today [18].

2.2. Common Property Transitions, Collective Tenure Systems and Private Regimes

Beyond the legal rhetoric regarding baldío goods or public lands, the spaces populated by Afro-descendants in the Colombian Caribbean usually respond to community use practices and management arrangements typical of the commons [20], and they tend to coexist with different family, individual and community tenure systems [17]. Beyond the forested areas of the Pacific, Afro-Colombian peoples have historically built complex tenure structures adapted to changing ecological and socio-political realities [21]. The theoretical debate on the effective management of the commons and their sustainability is spreading across several areas, including, on one hand, the increase in state institutionality and the promotion of centralized rules and, on the other hand, the privatization of the commons [20,22]. In contrast to the dichotomy of the public and private, collective management systems created by local regulatory arrangements are an efficient strategy and make significant contributions to conservation [20,23].

Community tenure regimes are a distinguishable set of national laws and regulations issued by states that govern all situations in which the right to own or manage natural resources is held at the community level [24]. In the case of Colombia, there are several normative and political instruments on the matter, but for Afro-descendants it is enshrined in Law 70 of 1993, which enables the collective titling procedure and ensures the imprescriptible and inalienable nature of communal lands. This collective titling has also been a strategy to conserve biodiversity [24].

Although Colombia has a long tradition of granting collective land rights, it has focused especially on the forested areas of the Amazon and the biogeographic Chocó region (In Colombia, approximately 38 million hectares of indigenous reserves and collective lands of black/Afro-descendant communities have been titled. According to state figures, in the case of indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples, there are still from 3 to 4 million hectares that remain to be titled). In the specific case of Afro-descendants, access to collective tenure rights is crucial in other types of ecosystems that are also inhabited by them, such as the Caribbean basins, coastal areas and other inland geographic valleys where privatization schemes have been consolidated in terms of both ownership and use of land and water [25]. Where adequate governance systems are not in place, the unintended effects of privatization can have detrimental consequences [26]; it can lead to the exclusion and commodification of ecosystems and deepening inequalities [27].

In the Colombian Caribbean, the region where the empirical cases in this research are located, there are communal lands such as savannahs and floodplains that are characterized by the richness of their ecosystems and by being the ancestral land of ethnic groups, mostly Afro-descendant populations. As for socio-ecosystems, which are especially dependent on flood cycles, introducing private logics leads to the degradation of resources and the loss of local ecological knowledge of fishing communities, peasants and gatherers [28].

Although there is a prohibition on individual ownership of state lands, except via assignment programs or agrarian reform processes, there are currently private titles to public lands. This is a legal contradiction but a reality that the state tries to counteract using processes of reparation and the restitution of patrimonial assets [4]. In community tenure systems, the eruption of the notion of property generates changes in forms of regulation since property implicitly entails an element of formality with rules established and protected by states [29]. As such, collective property is opposed to individual property insofar as only by this formal figure can land and ecosystems be guaranteed for future generations since collective property receives maximum protection in Colombian legal regulations.

The formalization of land tenure is one strategy to reduce poverty [30], strengthening local governance systems and confronting the territorial control that large industries can exert by owning large tracts of land [31]. Other factors that differentially affect vulnerable communities, such as climate change, environmental risks and food and physical insecurity, are directly or indirectly related to tenure issues [30].

2.3. The Colombian Caribbean as a Case Study: The Communal Savannahs of Valledupar

The Caribbean coast, including its plains, savannahs and swamps, is a historical settlement of the Afro-Colombian population. Their presence is better known in the urban areas of Cartagena, Santa Marta and in the rural towns of northern Bolivar and Magdalena, whereas Valledupar is not part of the Afro-Caribbean imaginary. The Caribbean population that self-recognized as Afro-descendant in the 2018 census is 1,000,590. Specifically in the Cesar department, there are 142,436 Afro-descendants. The rural area of Valledupar accounts for at least 69.10%. Here, one piece of data that remains controversial is the amount of communal savannah, since the Land Use Plan states that the savannahs occupy 42,281.2 hectares, the equivalent to 9.85% of the total area of the municipality, and are located in the alluvial valley of the Cesar River and in part of the foothills of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. This delimitation, however, does not take into account the more than 10,000 hectares of savannah that exist in the other townships. Based on remote sensing sources, the existence of the structure and functionality of savannahs and playones is recognized in at least 28% of the rural area [18].

The Afrovallenata population, as these peoples are referred to in the region, has been historically linked to the savannah; its presence has several origins. On one hand, it is associated with palenques or settlements of black maroons, and on the other, it is associated with smuggling slaves that entered through illegal ports in the Guajira in northern Colombia. According to historian Hugues Sánchez [32], Valledupar, formerly known as Santos Reyes del Valle de Upar and founded in 1550, was characterized as a very poor frontier zone that steered its economy towards cattle raising. The presence of slaves during the 16th century stems from those who lived as maroons in the Cesar River valley and the foothills of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. There is historiographic documentation from this region of the country on the slave markets in Valledupar and Valencia de Jesús. In Valledupar, there are only notarial documents that bear witness to these transactions since 1789, and, in Valencia de Jesús, the documents only exist from 1727 [32].

In local history, there is a strong appropriation of memories told by parents and grandparents evoking the existence of black populations in the region, scattered around all the basins, especially the Cesar and Badillo rivers. Several of these stories recreate a diasporic experience across endless savannahs between Cesar and the Guajira and between Colombia and Venezuela.

Further insight into the area’s settlement history shines the spotlight on the 19th century. Sánchez states that the haciendas and baldío lands of the 18th century gave way to small sites inhabited by poor peasants leading to an expansion of the agricultural frontier towards border zones (the foothills of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and the Serranía del Perijá) [33].

In the communal savannahs of Valledupar, boundaries emerged with the arrival of barbed wire in the first half of the 20th century. These landscapes were part of the wild territories mentioned by Serje [33] as a series of zones that were marginalized centuries ago from the colonial order for several reasons, including the resistance of maroon and indigenous groups and the apparent scarcity of exploitable resources.

In Valledupar, unlike other regions where there were baldíos at the beginning of the 20th century, there were no strong confrontations between settlers and landowners, nor were there major occupations in the agrarian struggles of the 1930s. As its rural inhabitants recall, “the lands were free” and the waters were free, and they flowed down from the Sierra Nevada and enabled productive activities and the sustainability of the ecosystems associated with the savannahs and playones [6]. The Garupales, Badillo, Sagarriga, Gutapurí and Cesar rivers are some of these important watersheds that have been depleted since 1950, to the extent that various business and state actors have fenced off the plains and privatized the shallows and other alluvial spaces for cattle ranching, rice fields and oil palm monocultures to the detriment of the baldíos.

With the arrival of new actors in the savannahs during the last century came the cultivation of commercial rice in 1950 and agricultural modernization with cotton crops, followed by oil palm in the 1980s in the villages of Badillo and Alto de la Vuelta. Native rice varieties were gradually disappearing, as were the playones where they were planted. This meant damage to the agrifood systems and a phenomenon of gradual land and water grabbing that would happen years later in other regions of the Caribbean [8]. As described by Borras, Kay and Wilkinson [34], land grabbing can also be derived from local fencing as an effect of global capitalism dynamics [35,36]. Before these interventions, Afro-descendants were mostly shepherds, fishing communities and gatherers. All of these were sustainable activities that did not generate major disturbances in natural cover [33]; on the contrary, they represented an adequate management of ecosystems that naturally oscillated from water stress to periods of flooding. Geographers and anthropologists have documented that these are practices of coexistence within natural systems [28].

Currently, Afro-descendant communities are organized based on the figure that legally qualifies them as authorities in the territories: community councils. There are more than ten councils in the municipality, but this research focuses on those along the Cesar River (Figure 1) due to how important their lands are in the national discussion on reserved baldíos and the necessary review of the restrictions on collective titling, which have meant that today, 12 years after presenting titling requests to the state, not a single title has been granted to the communities of Valledupar [18].

Given that this region was the scene of the armed conflict, the state has implemented some reparation measures for the victims. The communities covered in this study have requested the right to territory, autonomy and the right to lead their own development model as a measure of reparation. The acts of violence that caused confinement and forced displacement date back to 1996 with the arrival of paramilitary groups [4]. For all these reasons, the current transitional justice policy, particularly the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (abbreviated as JEP in Spanish), has included this region among the cases under analysis.

3. Materials and Methods

The methodology combines cartographic sources, especially those derived from remote sensing, and field data collection guided by a socio-ecological approach and ethnographic tools such as interviews (49), focus groups (3) and tours conducted at two points in time (October–November 2019 and September–October 2022) (The field phase was interrupted by the pandemic period that prevented mobility between cities and urban centers due to lockdown. For this reason, there were two phases of fieldwork with members of the community councils defined by the ethnic authorities of the territory) [37].

I carried out the collection of primary sources in close coordination with the authorities of the community councils. Given that the research subjects belong to ethnic communities, the methodological design was discussed and adapted to the conditions of the collectives involved. Thus, to define the representativeness of the participants in the research, in dialogue with the leaders of each community, people were identified who were knowledgeable about the different socio-environmental dynamics and ways of life of the local communities due to their experiences as shepherds, fishermen, agriculturists, monoculture workers and teachers in local schools; their leadership; and their time spent in the territory. The selection of participants was intended to ensure qualitative representation, in terms of what geographer Meghan Cope considers relevant, to find out why and how certain activities and events occur in environmental problems based on ethnographic instruments adapted to the local realities [38] (

Table A1. Selection and representativeness of participants in qualitative fieldwork phase.

	Phase 0 Instrument Design	Phase 1 Field Instrument Coordination November 2019	Phase 2 Implementation and Application of Instruments September–October 2022
Instruments	Stakeholders’ experience and knowledge about the following phases.	Considerations of the ethnic authorities on requirements.	Final selection of participants.
Semi-structured interviews on environmental history with emphasis on biophysical aspects.	People knowledgeable about the rural and environmental world of the savannah communities, ideally with trades linked to the use of natural resources such as fishing or the harvesting of dry forest fruits, or people within the community with an interest in historical or environmental aspects (such as teachers in local schools).	It should be taken into account that each community council has people considered by them to be “wise men” who act as local historians. These are people who know the history of the region and are responsible for the transmission of oral memory about settlement, uses and customs, problems and achievements. They recommended that at least two people in each community should be contacted in this role.	In the field, the willingness of stakeholders to participate was confirmed. Contacted savants: The Dog: 1 (♂) Guacoche: 2 (♂) Guacochito: 2 (1 ♂ and 1 ♀) Badillo: 3 (2 ♂ and 1 ♀) Los Venados: 1 (♂) Guaymaral: 1 (♂) Average age: 88 Total: 10 interviews
Semi-structured interviews on changes in production systems (effects of privatization)	Men or women with knowledge of grazing or natural resource extraction activities in the areas of savannahs that were privatized. People with an interest in these issues such as local teachers.	It should be taken into account that herding can be a family or associative activity. It was considered that there are no fishermen left in the communities, but there are people who were involved in this activity before the collapse of the system. It was considered that some people who are currently dedicated to the extraction of sand from the river for the sale of construction material were once fishermen. They are known locally as “paleros”. In addition, they recommended including at least 1 local schoolteacher per community.	Shepherds: 9 (♂) Person who is or was engaged in riverine fishing: 7 (♂) Local schoolteachers: 6 (4 ♀ + 2 ♂) Paleros: 7 (♂) The Dog: 2 Guacoche: 4 Guacochito: 5 Badillo: 5 Los Venados: 6 Guaymaral: 7 Average age: 69 Total: 29 interviews
Interviews’ socio-political and organizational context	Men or women with organizational leadership roles in community councils and the movements of victims of violence.	Each community council has a delegate for dialogue with the national and regional government. These are men and women who are familiar with the rights agenda. The councils also have groups of young people organized around environmental recovery projects. Regarding the victims of the armed conflict, they suggested conducting telephone interviews with members of the communities that are currently collaborating with various transitional justice agencies.	Leaders in dialogue with the state: 6 (2 ♀ + 4 ♂), with 1 from each council. Youth groups: 4 (3 ♀ + 1 ♂). Only those from Guacohe, Guacochito and Badillo could be contacted. Average age: 34 Total: 7 field interviews + 3 telephone interviews with victims of the armed conflict).
Focus groups on explanatory factors and effects in the SES approach.	People interested in initiating dialogue and debate aspects about the social history of the Afro-descendant communities in the region, the changes in the landscape and the current conditions as current subjects that aspire to be repaired by the state.	The ethnic authorities recommended conducting the focus group with delegates who had already been interviewed and who expressed their willingness to participate in the deliberative spaces suggested by this research.	A total of 3 focus groups were conducted with the participation of 16 members (9 ♀ + 8 ♂), with one group in the northern zone, another in the southern zone and a third focus group in the northern zone, given that peacebuilding actions and victim reparation measures have been prioritized in that region.

). Additionally, it was taken into account that the area of the community councils is very heterogeneous; for example, Guaymaral exceeds 11,000 hectares, while El Perro does not reach 300 hectares. These sizes greatly contrast with the size of their individual populations. For this reason, there are variations in the number of people interviewed in each community (Appendix A).

The fieldwork was guided by two different instruments: focus groups and semi-structured interviews. Given the intention of the research to delve into the changes and transitions from public goods/communal lands to various privatization schemes, these focus groups were guided by the cartographic inputs and results of the multi-temporal analysis to discuss with local communities the causes and implications of the changes detected in the remote sensing (

Table A2. Instrument designed for recording and guiding semi-structured dialogues with stakeholders on sustainability dimensions.

Spaces Affected by Privatization	What is the Type of Actor Promoting Privatization?	What Are the Main Changes Perceived in the Natural System?	What Are the Main Changes Perceived in Livelihoods?	Which Periods Are the Most Important?
Savannahs
Alluvial plains (locally known as playones)
Ponds and other bodies of water for fishing
Tropical dry forest areas

). Taking into account that some of the people interviewed are victims of the armed conflict, three interviews on the current reparation process and the respondents’ participation in the peace tribunal appearing on environmental crimes were conducted by telephone at the request of the community authorities to ensure confidentiality [39]. Finally, triangulation was applied to the multiple research methods used to collect the data and the contrast between the spatial data, usually in alphanumeric language, and the descriptive and reflexive data obtained with ethnographic instruments [40]. Triangulation was also applied to the results’ divergence from previous research and their dialogue with governmental information on land formation, land use and regulation of public-use goods.

As for the cartographic analysis, it focused on the areas involved in the collective titling requests that the communities have submitted to the state. The polygons drawn by these areas on the map are available in the database kept by the Observatory of Ethnic Territories of the Javeriana University. The years 2000 and 2022 were established for the analysis due to the availability of images for the northern and southern zones. An image from the Landsat 7 satellite (LE0700805320000204) was used for the year 2000 and from the Landsat 9 satellite (LC0900805320220115) for the year 2020 [41]. After obtaining the main inputs, the Google Earth Engine platform was used to run the analysis [42].

First, the satellite images were corrected [43]. The corrected images were then cropped down to the community council layer. The land cover analysis was classified into pasture, shrubland, water bodies and urban fabric. For the supervised classification, the random forest learning classifier was used, which was fed with 195 polygons for the year 2000 and 284 for the year 2022. These polygons were delimited and classified by means of photointerpretation in Google Earth. The random forest classifier was configured to categorize based on 5 decision trees [44]. Subsequently, area-cover landscape metrics were obtained to make an interpretation of how land cover and landscape structures have changed in community councils over the 20 years of the increased impact of privatization [45].

Finally, to gain a deeper and better understanding of the realities of the landscape, a buffer with a 2 km radius was set from the urban centers of Guacochito, Badillo, Guacoche, Los Venados and Guaymaral, and the previously obtained classification layers were cropped from these buffers to calculate the area by land cover of the territory of the community councils closest to the population centers [45]. This buffer made it possible to focus the analysis on the places that Afro-descendants still use collectively since the areas of savannahs and playones farthest from the population centers are the most affected by the change in use and changes in tenure regimes.

4. Results

The findings have been structured according to the analysis levels in the research objectives: the transformation of the socio-ecological systems in the study area, the ecological and cultural implications of the change from common property tenure systems to private regimes and the identified challenges relevant to Colombia’s new political and social time of transition and peace building.

4.1. The Burden of Privatization on the Commons

For the Afro-descendant population of Valledupar, the arrival of barbed wire in the savannahs represents a factual and highly symbolic element in narrating the privatization of the commons. As the data presented in this section show, both in the south and north of the municipality, this practice of fencing communal lands became consolidated in the 1960s but began in the 1920s. Cattle ranching landowners from nearby regions promoted the expansion of grazing areas on lands that the communities considered to be of ancestral use by local people. Rice and oil palm entrepreneurs also resorted to barbed wire.

Table 1. Hectares of commons affected by privatization.

Community Council	Corregimiento *	Afro-Descendant Population	Area (ha)	Area Affected by Privatization
Carlota Redondo de Álvarez	El Perro	610	296.687	197
Los Cardonales	Guacoche	3800	1144.096	765.4
Archilla, Cardón and Tuna	Guacochito	1200	2055.052	1202.5
Manuel Salvador Suárez Almenares	Los Venados	3200	5778.201	4459.5
José Prudencio Padilla	Badillo	2100	7513.888	6326.4
Marcelino Ochoa Álvarez—“Catelo”	Guaymaral	1950	11,638.507	8452.3

Information gathered from cadastral sources and municipal zoning plans. This information was compared to field information and satellite images as indicated in the methodology and Appendix B. * Political-administrative unit at the municipal level. The population data is based on the census prepared in 2022 by the Caribbean Community Councils Network.

details the magnitude of privatization consolidated in the period of 1960–2022.

In all the communities analyzed, privatization has affected more than 80% of their former use, management and circulation spaces. Wire fencing has changed daily life in the savannahs and floodplains, affecting forms of grazing, fishing seasons, hunting activities and the meeting places between neighboring populations. In remote rural villages, barbed wire often represents models of imposed territorial organization and forms of appropriation derived from a superior social order [46]. The communal ecosystems in Valledupar currently feature a barbed wire border that the local inhabitants rarely dare to transgress.

Much of the private property erected on these savannahs is recent in origin, and there is no clear documentation as to how the legal principles that prevent the titling of reserved baldíos were breached [4]. The entities involved in the allocation of baldíos and their protection have deregulated the procedures to such an extent that the wire fence of the supposed private property reaches the edge of the rivers. Today, all these factors that configure the scenarios of the dispossession of natural resources are being reviewed in the context of transitional justice; thus, the case of Valledupar and others in the Caribbean allow us to understand that the socio-ecological damage could probably be repaired with the existing legal frameworks of transitional justice.

In the case of Valledupar, agrarian and environmental historiography recognizes periods marked by changes in production models, the incidence of the conflict and the modernization of the countryside via monoculture production. Although hydrocarbon exploration and exportation are also important in the region, they occurs in neighboring municipalities.

Table 2. Historical milestones in agrarian models and management policies and collective rights.

Milestones	1970–1980	1990–2000	2000–2010	2010–2020
Livestock	Reduction in livestock production due to the presence of guerrillas.	Increase in extensive cattle ranching on public lands.		Reconversion of livestock areas to mixed shrubland areas.
Palm oil	Arrival of oil palm monocultures in the area north of Valledupar.	The oil palm production chain is linked to oil palm extraction plants in nearby regions within the framework of favorable public policies that encourage this crop.		The area planted with oil palm is stabilizing.
Rice	Fencing of floodable ecosystems for rice cultivation.		Decrease in rice plantations due to projects to drain flood lands and use them for oil palm.
Organization of community councils	The Afro-descendant communities were not organized politically as an ethnic group, but they were organized in Community Action Boards to manage services such as water, roads and education.	New political constitution that recognizes the rights of Afro-descendants.	First forced displacements and confinement due to violence by paramilitary groups.	The communities request the state to recognize collective ownership of savannahs and beaches taken away by the armed conflict and agro-industrial development models.
		- Law of black communities that regulates collective property rights over ancestral lands.
Periods of violence	Presence of guerrillas in nearby areas (FARC and Ejército de Liberación Nacional ELN).	Consolidation of illegal self-defense groups.	Justice and Peace Law for the demobilization of paramilitary groups.	Peace Process and Agreement with FARC guerrillas.
Victim reparation policies			Policies for the protection of lands affected by forced displacement.	- Land reparation and restitution law - Historical memory Law - Transitional justice law

Sources: Field work (Appendix A) and references cited: periods of violence and victim reparation policies [4]; livestock and palm oil [47]; rice [19]; organization of community councils [18].

summarizes the most decisive historical periods for the case study and compares them with the socio-political dynamics that influence the commons.

4.2. Implications for Socio-Ecological Systems

Privatization has not caused the degradation of natural systems in all the areas analyzed. In fact, as will be shown below, the multi-temporal analysis shows an increase in some vegetation cover, especially in low shrublands typical of the savannah. One of the reasons for this recovery, especially in the southern region, is the change from extensive cattle ranching to silvopastoral schemes promoted by the Caribbean cattle guilds [48]. In the Cesar basin, there are some experimental plots but no published data to contrast them. In any case, this transition, even on a small scale, is showing positive results for vegetation cover. Another reason is a better distribution of the rainy season during 2021 and 2022, which has had a positive impact on the recovery of vegetation cover, according to data from the Colombian meteorological authority (the state open data system on monthly precipitations in the Colombian territory. http://www.ideam.gov.co/web/tiempo-y-clima/precipitacion-mensual-por-ano (accessed on 13 January 2023).

However, the set of data analyzed in the cadastral sources and the field data shows that, in the environmental history of these savannah areas, Afro-descendant communities have been gradually losing access to the commons. On average, the seven studied community councils’ access to the commons has declined from 100% to 7%. The implications of this on the social–ecological systems are detailed in Figure 2.

During the fieldwork, the communities and I wondered what must have happened in the environmental history of Valledupar to leave only one wild cashew tree remaining in the community of Los Venados, in the south of the municipality.

The first explanation would be that cotton fever drove the deforestation of this and other trees, but according to local history, the cottonwoods do not appear to be responsible. In fact, the wild cashew was razed mainly by palm companies and cattle ranchers who believed that the guerrillas were hiding behind its trunks. Later, they discovered a prosperous timber business that would further motivate the logging of the wild cashew (Anacardium excelsum), claiming that it was a refuge for the guerrillas. The same fate would befall other trees including the carob, achiote, carreto, almond and cañahuate. These trees guaranteed water in times of drought, protected the springs and the soil and sheltered the savannah’s avifauna.

As can be seen in Figure 2, the causes are multiple and complex, and although it is a region affected by the armed conflict, what most affects the commons are institutionalized public policies such as large-scale agriculture and cattle ranching.

Hedging Analysis

A multi-temporal analysis of the most recent period of analyzed environmental history shows changes in land cover, especially in the savannah area (Figure 3 and Figure 4). Both in the south and in the north, the areas destined to become monocrops have grown, but at the same time, the areas of shrublands and low vegetation cover typical of these tropical ecosystems have recovered (

Table 3. Hedging analysis of the area south and north of Valledupar.

Land Cover	1960 (%)	2000 (%)	2022 (%)
Community-use savannahs	52	23	7
Population centers (discontinuous urban fabric)	6	20	27
Monocultures (large-scale agriculture area)	13	39.5	53.7
Flooded areas (planices or playones)	28	16.3	9.4
Other coverages	1	1.2	2.9

Sources: The year 1960 was taken from the data available at the Insitituto Agutín Codazzi (cartographic authority of Colombia). The years 2020 and 2022 were photointerpreted from Landsat images described in the methodology.

). Although the communities have lost their use and communal lands have disappeared in the local zoning, some lands have been regenerated and extensive cattle ranching is decreasing. The communities closest to the city of Valledupar, such as Guacoche and Guacochito (Arcilla, Cardón and Tuna and Los Cardonales on the map) are the only ones where the urban area is growing. The most recent Land Use Plan of Valledupar confirms this trend and considers these areas susceptible to urban expansion (

Table A4. Results of the multi-temporal analysis in the buffer areas of the community’s population centers.

Coverages	2000 Hectares	2000%	2022 Hectares	2022%
Pastures	3553.87	79.05%	2320	51.62%
Open shrublands	669.82	14.90%	1762.184	39.21%
Alluvial plains (locally known as playones)	12.7387	0.28%	10.034	0.22%
Other coverages		0.00%	272.542	6.06%
Urban fabric	259.092	5.76%	129.761	2.89%
	4495.52		4494.52

).

In Caribbean ecosystems, agricultural disturbances have been found to significantly affect the abundance and richness of fauna and flora species [2] and compromise the long-term resilience of natural systems and food security [34]. Monocultures in Cesar and other Caribbean regions are homogenizing the landscape structure and putting pressure on natural grasslands, forested areas and water recharge zones [47]. This is evident in the northern zone of Valledupar, where oil palm cultivation, as a perennial late-yielding crop, has been growing until it borders the population center and the main water sources. Although there does not seem to be a very clear pattern of growth, in the field observation the community councils noted that the oil palm crop is growing more and more towards the mountainous areas; i.e., it is no longer exclusively in the flat, easily irrigated lands.

The growth of the urban fabric is also an issue to be taken into account in land-use planning policies. The special analysis shows that in 40 years it has increased from 6% to 27% in the savannah landscape matrix. This trend is consistent with the population increase in the Caribbean [17,19]. However, the urban fabric that is growing in the areas near the city of Valledupar, in the community councils of the northern zone, responds to the construction of rest houses or second homes for families from the city. The savannahs do not have the conditions to support houses with swimming pools or infrastructure that demands water in an ecosystem that suffers long periods of drought [2]. Aspects such as basic sanitation and environmental management have not been considered in this urban explosion. The long-term impact is clear: there will be a greater demand for goods and services and new obstacles to secure tenure rights for Afro-descendant peoples [7].

In the 1960 period of analysis, the configuration of coverage was typical of a dry Caribbean valley, a landscape matrix dominated by savannahs, scattered population centers and aquifer recharge areas in a percentage close to 30%. By that year, there was already evidence of a group of properties dedicated to monoculture: in this case, there was both rice and cotton. By the beginning of the 2000s, a trend of decreasing communal savannas and floodable ecosystems had already been consolidated, in agreement with other studies on common goods in the Caribbean [19,33]. It is clear that monocultures are growing to the detriment of natural covers, including pastures for grazing. Finally, the year 2022 shows the consolidation of a model of the privatization of common lands, and now the landscape matrix is dominated by agroindustrial crops in a natural system that has steadily lost its water potential [7].

4.3. Challenges in the Current Policy on Ecological Transition, Politics and Peace Building

A recent report by the Colombian Truth Commission [4] proposed a periodization of the occurrence of the conflict in the Caribbean region ranging from the first half of the 20th century to the year 2021. The most significant milestones are marked by the transformation of the hacienda model towards small towns and dispersed cities. The hacienda has been defined by Fals Borda as an invention of the New World, with its concrete expression varying from one era to another according to the development of productive forces but strongly marked by cattle ranching and a certain political culture that transcends traditional productive systems and that is part of many levels of social life [49]. It is difficult to understand the environmental history of the Caribbean without recognizing the hacienda model and its transition from cattle ranching to other productive systems and forms of land use, including the construction of cities. This model oriented spatial organization and had a great impact on the deforestation of vegetation cover related to floodable areas [35].

These dispossessions involving the period of violence in Valledupar produced ruptures in community livelihoods linked to both environmental regime changes and ecological events. An investigation promoted by the Unidad para las Víctimas (a transitional state institution) identified more than one hundred sites of violent events that redefined relationships within the territory (the file was consulted at the UN office in Valledupar in 2021. The project, supported by UNDP, was titled “Identification of possible collective damages and places of victimizing events of the community councils of black communities in the municipality of Valledupar”, was executed between 2003–2014 and takes into account Decree Law 4635 of 2011. The identified damages correspond to the categories of damage to cultural integrity and environmental and territorial damage). According to the Unidad para la Víctimas study, the savannahs were cemeteries during the paramilitary period, and the central plazas went from being meeting points to places of fear and intimidation (

Table 4. Synthesis of focus groups and interviews.

Spaces Affected by Privatization	Type of Actor Promoting Privatization	Main Changes Perceived in the Ways and Means of Living
Savannahs and playones	- Large-scale cattle ranchers (large estates) - Rice industries - Palm oil industrialists - Armed actors - State	- Moving away from fishing communities and savannah herders has been the main change. - The majority of the land has been prepared by landowners for the planting of rice and African palm. - Although some natives sold land, the buyers ran the barbed wire at more than double what they bought it for. - There is overcrowding in the population centers, especially in Badillo, because there is no area available for urban expansion or growth, since the entire territory is used for rice and oil palm plantations. - High levels of contamination due to pesticide spraying of rice and palm oil. - The palm and rice owners have closed the roads or corridors that helped the communities communicate with the savannahs and other towns. - In communities such as Guacoche and Guacochito, because they are close to the city of Valledupar, there is growing pressure from real estate groups that want to build expensive houses in gated condominiums. - During periods when armed groups, especially paramilitaries, were present, the community was prohibited from using communal lands, and all agricultural and livestock activities and mobility between one community and another were controlled.

Sources: Focus groups with 16 members of the local community and authorities of the Afro-descendant people cross-checked with 49 interviews (Table A1).

).

For all these reasons, Valledupar is part of the regions targeted by several of the transitional justice entities, including the aforementioned peace tribunal (JEP). During the field work, it became evident that the community councils and local public entities are considering that the ecological damages and affectations should be known and sanctioned by the judges of the peace tribunal (On the peace tribunal’s web page, the work region is considered in case 08. This means that the community councils that have been victims of the armed conflict will be able to participate in the processes that the tribunal will enable and request reparation measures https://www.jep.gov.co/macrocasos/caso08.html (accessed on 25 January 2023)). Regarding what the loss of natural ecosystems has meant for local communities and for the entire region, they consider that restorative justice, a recent approach of the peace court, should take into account the restoration of transformed socio-ecological systems [50].

Colombia’s environmental history has never been so crucial. The future decisions of this court should be based on the facts that changed the relationship between the local communities and their ecosystems and on the measures that contribute to channel models of ecological and cultural sustainability that are compatible with the standards of justice demanded by the victims and society [50].

In addition, Colombia’s new government has recently presented the National Development Plan (abbreviated to PND in Spanish) with the guidelines that will guide the country for the next four years. Among these is the change in the land-use planning model. Once again, environmental history and socio-ecological systems are in force, since the PND considers that the planning that most contributes to sustainability is the one that considers water as the structuring axis of environmental and agrarian plans and policies. Water management, as it was conducted by the communities of the Cesar River before the arrival of extensive cattle ranching and agribusiness, seems to be one of the criteria of the new national policy. (The National Development Plan 2022–2026 was designed based on a broadly participatory methodology called Binding Dialogues. In February 2023, the government published an extensive document with everything they found in the regions of the country by way of challenges for change. The three sectors that received the most proposals are housing, city and territory; agriculture, fishing and rural development; and environment and sustainability. The plan is available at https://www.dnp.gov.co/Paginas/plan-nacional-de-desarrollo-2023-2026.aspx (accessed on 22 March 2023).)

This implies technical, socio-cultural, ecological and, of course, political challenges. The environmental history of Valledupar shows how, in 100 years, the commons have disappeared due to changes in the use of structures, tenure systems, ecosystems and socio-political dynamics. Common spatial patterns in other Caribbean regions [51], in which some ways of life have been imposed over others, and some management models, contrary to collective rights, have been consolidated. Of the 28,500 hectares demarcated as areas of the traditional occupation of Afro-descendant communities in Valledupar, the Colombian state does not report any progress in its information systems because it has not responded to the insistent claims of the communities or of academic and international organizations present in the region. (Since 2010, the community councils have been accompanied by international organizations that have provided technical, environmental, legal and socio-cultural support. These include the UNDP office of the UN and the Rights and Resources Initiative Coalition. Numerous universities are also present in the region).

Thus, under this new political climate and the change in models that Colombia is experiencing, cases such as that of Valledupar should be addressed permanently by the state. This creates a great opportunity to articulate the historical approach to the study of ecosystems under comprehensive sustainability criteria. This case shows that, without the recognition of tenure rights, the recovery of savannahs and water bodies is insufficient, and that it is necessary to balance the use rights of the communities with the restoration of the savannahs and alluvial plains and the recovery of the Cesar River.

Some of the main challenges that this study found in light of the field data are conceptual or interpretative and operational. The following are some aspects that may be indicative for the use of the environmental history approach and the social–ecological systems approach (SES) in the current transition in Colombia and especially in the Caribbean region (

Table 5. Interaction between environmental history and transitional politics.

Main Topics under Discussion	Conceptual/Interpretive Challenges	Operational–Methodological Challenges	Adjustments from Environmental History and SES
Public-use properties, wastelands and ancestral lands or territories	When the scale of analysis is a watershed such as the Cesar River, these notions interact and overlap. Contrary to what happens in other areas of the country, in Valledupar, the lands of the Afro-descendant communities have no demarcation. Thus, from the state’s perspective, these types of basins are interpreted as public lands on which there may be private property of diverse origins. There is a risk of making invisible the collective tenure structures that have been erased as a result of privatization models.	- Rural cadastral sources have high levels of outdatedness. - The topology cartographic bases should be updated with spatiotemporal analyses that show spatiotemporal changes in ecosystem cover and use. This provides factual evidence for land-use plans and peace-building policies. - Since 2011, when the Victims Law and the specific decrees for ethnic groups came into force, various state institutions, academics and community organizations have carried out diagnoses that already show the articulation between institutional cartographies with local visions of the territory.	Transcend the vision of land as a legal asset or as an asset of a productive process. From the ecosystemic dimension, land is part of a set of interactions between social and natural systems that have coexisted and co-evolved. In Palacios’s words, when land is considered an environmental category, new aspects must be included in a historical framework, i.e., studied in the context of a multiplicity of cultural meanings intertwined with natural factors [52].
Tenure rights	Legal restrictions have prevented the state from collectively titling the savannah and floodplain lands of Valledupar. (According to the Observatory of Ethnic Territories of the Javeriana University, as of 2022 there are 437 requests for collective titling that Afro-descendant communities have submitted to the Colombian state. Of these, 159 are located in the Caribbean region). For this reason, collective tenure rights are currently being demanded by community councils. Some of the requests have already been pending for 10 years without a response from the state. In Law 70 of 1993, the definition of collective tenure for Afro-descendant communities is significantly different from the forms in which these relationships occur in the Caribbean.	- In the Caribbean, there are about 160 applications for collective titling. There are many applications but little land available, according to the Land Fund of the agrarian institution (abbreviated as ANT in Spanish). - Title applications should overlap with ecosystems susceptible to community use such as savannahs, floodplains and other similar landscapes where the current or former presence of local communities has been verified.	Incorporating the notion of territory into tenure rights would facilitate the reorganization of space under socio-ecological criteria, considering what has happened in the watershed, why it has changed and in what periods. This would make it possible to situate tenure rights as an integral part of the socio-ecological system and not as a legal attribute to be recognized by the state. Nature conceived as territory is related to the way in which actors appropriate and organize nature based on systems of knowledge and use.
Cross-cultural environmental justice	In the JEP’s restorative justice approach, its interpretative framework should be broadened. One way is to consider that in ecoregions the temporal scales of greater victimization also coincide with significant changes in the structure and functionality of natural systems (the arrival of productive models demanding high quantities of biomass). In general, this landscape transition is only analyzed as a change in production systems or rural development models.	- The instruments of transitional justice can and should be in dialogue with the Land Management Plans at the level of the political-administrative units, and with the life plans of the ethnic groups. - Any measures taken by state entities must take into account the specific needs of the ethnic groups. - The diagnostic and characterization instruments that the state uses as a baseline to propose environmental projects and policies should recognize local ecological knowledge as valid knowledge.	The interpretative framework of transitional justice must incorporate the environmental and intercultural dimension [53]. Afro-descendant communities consider the main damages to be the loss of natural systems and the limitations of collective practices such as fishing or grazing [54].Therefore, an ecosystemic and socio-ecological approach could situate land cover changes, whether abrupt or gradual, as serious impacts on natural systems. These could be agroecosystems, dry forest areas, fishing systems, flooded lands or a mixture of all of them, as in fact occurs in tropical heterogeneous landscapes.

Sources: Focus groups with 16 members of the local community and authorities of the Afro-descendant people, interviews, and cited references.

).

5. Discussion

The commons documented here from the environmental history of Valledupar show how there has been a close and constitutive relationship between Afro-descendant peoples in the savannah and floodplain ecosystems. In the expectations of recognition and the formalization of tenure rights over these ecosystems, it was found that the collective character prevails despite the privatization model that has been consolidated in most of the 20th century and so far in the 21st century [8,19].

The history of savannahs requires long-term knowledge and different scales that show the anthropic evolution and show how changes respond to a cumulative process related to processual and arbitrary alterations in the structure and functioning of ecosystems [12]. The Cesar River basin shows how the consolidation of the cattle ranching and plantation model was superimposed on the associative practices of gathering, fishing and grazing in the inland Caribbean [55], and although the structure of the ecosystems maintains some of its main elements, the functionality has changed drastically. The area under collective management has been reduced by up to 93% in 100 years. Studies in similar regions show that the livelihoods of the rural poor depend regularly on the use of natural resources and the provision of ecosystem services. They are therefore highly vulnerable to environmental degradation, especially if it limits their ability to sustain their consumption of goods and services over time [56].

The actors in dispute are dissimilar. On the one hand, the state seeks to exercise public ownership over the national baldíos that, until now, have never been incorporated into the cadastre as public property or managed in their use as public goods; on the other hand, since 2010, the community councils of Valledupar have been asking the state to recognize the collective ownership of ecosystems that were, for the most part, spaces shared by Afro-descendant communities who populated the margins of the Cesar River and other major bodies of water [57]. Today, barbed wire prevents their collective appropriation and hinders the work of the state in clarifying what is and what is not a baldío. The wire fencing produces a de facto boundary between private property and community occupation and is the most effective symbol of the other actor that shapes this dispute between agroindustrial entrepreneurs, Afro-descendant communities and the state [58].

According to Riviel, barbed wire was invented because various technological advances led in a single direction, with the emerging possibility and desire to control space not only as a sequence of points but also in its entirety, along an entire plane. If its use emerged in agriculture and spread to warfare and political control, it was because in agriculture, warfare and politics alike there was a need for a cheap tool to control space that could be deployed quickly and on a large scale [58].

The boundary between a baldío, a reserved baldío, a public asset, an ethnic territory and monoculture land is blurred for several reasons. The legal instruments and concepts of Western law that gave rise to the concept of baldío are far removed from the actual practices on these properties. In addition to the fact that the law is inconsistent with the practices of those who inhabit it, within the law itself there are debates regarding who can access it and under which rules of the game and at what scope it can be accessed. Destabilizing what we understand as public lands in Valledupar requires a judicious review of the settlement histories of this rural fraction of the Caribbean. From this historization, between local history and bibliographic sources, important milestones emerge in the dispossession of natural resources, largely due to privatization and land grabbing phenomena [5,59]. According to Senent-De Frutos, in order for areas such as law to take seriously ecological damage and changes in the way of life of local communities, the criterion of sustainability, complexly understood, must be introduced thoughtfully into the legal system as a whole as a way to make the reparation measures issued by the courts viable, fair and feasible [53].

From the socio-ecological approach, regime shifts are one of the theses that show how change in a given ecological cycle can be driven by other changes in the forms of use and the management of a resource or ecosystem. Drastic fluctuations in the forms of common resource use may be indicative of changes in social structure and governance regimes, climate, pollination cycles and flooding patterns, among other signs of an ecosystem in crisis [60,61]. Crumley proposes another approach, analyzing how different historical events have transformed the way in which ecological systems operate in the face of market pressures, wars and a competition over resources [62].

These practices fragmented what is known in the area as the great extended family of the savannah and, among the main effects, caused the loss of knowledge systems and resilience [63]. They undermined the confidence to walk along alleys and irrigation ditches, to spend the night out on the playones, to go fishing, to organize community meetings for administering natural resources and, above all, for exercising politics. The initial scenario the abandonment of traditional productive activities. Land, animal husbandry and grazing in the communal savannahs were forcibly abandoned, and, according to testimonies, there was no longer anyone to watch out for those who would cross the barbed wire.

Currently, most conflicts involve the availability, access and control of natural resources, which is the reason why the effects cannot be expressed in terms of abandoned, usurped or dispossessed hectares but rather of the violation of socio–ecological systems. Thus, framed within the historical confrontations between landowners and communities is a case of strict control of natural resources rooted in power relations, discrimination and racism. As examples of this situation, the research by Ojeda, Petzl, Quiroga, Rodríguez and Rojas analyze the expansion in other Caribbean regions of large oil palm and forestry plantations that cut off paths, produce borders, block neighboring spaces and shape what the authors call landscapes of daily dispossession [64].

In Valledupar, the multi-temporal analysis showed the pressure on wetland areas due to the expansion of urban infrastructure. Other studies show that the urbanization of this municipality has been carried out in an uncontrolled manner, without taking into account the characteristics of the watershed ecosystems, as the road infrastructure near the bodies of water continues to increase [65]. Especially in emerging countries such as Latin America and the Caribbean, land use and occupation have undergone several transformations in recent decades [66]. The transition from the communal savannah to other tenure systems shows the concrete uses of environmental history and its potential use for contemporary and prospective problems [67].

If the institutions leading the peace-building policy in the country are opting for the restorative character of transitional justice, this could be the path to rebuilding the link between the community councils of the Caribbean and their territory, which is fractured as a consequence of armed action and the dispossession of ancestral lands. However, it is necessary to consider that the responses provided by the mechanisms of truth, justice and reparation and the guarantees of non-repetition must take a particular approach that accounts in real terms for the socio-territorial and socio-environmental damages.

Although collective titling is the main means of protection, Afro-descendants need a subsidiary and expeditious mechanism to limit the large-scale exploitation of land and common goods by third parties because this exacerbates existing conflicts and creates new disputes that the communities alone cannot confront. Palm monocultures, the real estate boom and extensive cattle ranching are just some of the problems on a long list that continue to undermine the permanence of these populations in the savannah ecosystems [1].

Seeing territory as a victim has been a request and claim for years in Colombia [57]. Social movements, mainly driven by ethnic groups, positioned the notions of territory and territoriality as indivisible elements of their identity, history and materially rooted collective practices [68]. However, the intersection between ecology and transitional justice has only occurred explicitly since 2019 with a decision by the Special Jurisdiction for Peace that considered the territory of ethnic groups to be a victim of the armed conflict. This led to socio-legal analyses suggesting that the Colombian peace process is transforming the territory from an object to a legal subject that suffers harm and needs to be repaired [50,69]. The JEP is based on the systematic interpretation of the worldview of ethnic peoples according to national and international legal instruments on the protection of their rights and the determination of the socio-environmental and territorial damages that occurred in the ecosystems in the cases analyzed by the high court. (The detailed explanation can be found in Orders 079 of 2019 and 02 of 2020 of the Recognition Chamber of the JEP, in which the territories of the indigenous peoples Awá, Nasa and Misak are recognized as victims at the request of the peoples themselves, who have an integral conception of the world and understand the territory as a sacred living being and as a whole). This approach broadens the notion of victim while recognizing the relationality of social and ecological systems, their co-evolution and their co-dependence [63], as well as reinforcing the transcendental way in which indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples are linked to the land and ecosystems.

6. Conclusions

This research presented a detailed analysis of the transformation of socioecological systems in two regions of the Cesar River basin based on the documentation of environmental history. These results are generalizable to other regions of the dry Caribbean that have a similar ecosystem structure and population dynamics. Similarly, the patterns of the privatization of the commons are similar to those of other inland Caribbean basins where agroindustrial models have substituted natural cover and replaced the associative ways of life of pastoralists, fishing communities, collectors and small- and medium-scale agriculturists.

The most significant transition found in this basin for those who study common goods, community lands or family use and tenure systems is the loss of savannahs and alluvial plains in alarming percentages. In the documented historical evolution, it was found that Afro-descendant peoples currently have access to only 7% of the savannah areas they have inhabited for the last 100 years. A similar trend is seen in the beach areas that have been drained or imported for industrial rice and oil palm irrigation systems.

In a socio-ecosystem that is being transformed and confined, associative practices persist, and, above all, the will of collectives organized as community councils to recover former communal lands via special mechanisms of collective titling and reparations to those who have been victims of violence persists too but by considering new challenges such as climate change and biodiversity loss.

For all these reasons, the question of sustainability is crucial, along with other questions regarding what kind of lands can be recovered, what projects can be promoted by the communities and other actors in the region that can be ecologically and culturally appropriate, how to guarantee a fair integration of Afro-descendant peoples in land-use planning models, what standards of environmental justice could be applied in these cases, etc. The challenges are conceptual, methodological and operational as I discussed in Table 5. One of the challenges for environmental history research is the methodological approach. In this research, I proposed a mixed methods procedure that allows for confronting spatial and alphanumeric data with SES levels. Crucially, environmental history brings different nuances about tenure rights. This is not a history of property rights but a reconstruction of the interactions between community councils and the savannah and beach systems in the context of the multiple forces that condition this relationship, including occupation models, the state, the market, conflicts, etc.

In this historical narrative, based on changes in the landscape, it was possible to recognize how the SESs are closely linked to tenure systems. The possibility of hunting, fishing, circulating, gathering, building a house or having grazing animals depends exclusively on access to common goods. The tenure structure in these regions has only two options: communal land or private property. In this case study, the private property is not in the name of community members but belongs to outside individuals and companies. Therefore, the right of usufruct, decision making and inheritance rights for future generations will depend on the recovery of communal lands.

Finally, adequate state intervention can resolve the tension between the individual rights of business actors present in the region and the Afro-descendant peoples who expect to consolidate collective property titles that will allow them to continue with their ecosystem use and management practices and that will guarantee food security and roots for future generations. In this opportunity, the peace-building agenda seems to be the clearest window of opportunity for the new restorative justice approaches and the special consideration of the ecological damages that must be compensated.

The environmental history of the Caribbean is making it possible to finely weave the past and present with the complexity of the relationships that exist between natural systems and cultural systems, relationships that go beyond the practical sense of chronologies, facts and sources. The history of the systems of use of these flooded landscapes now drained, and of the commons now privatized, raises critical questions about what environmental studies have commonly called cover transformation or ecosystem degradation. For ecological and cultural sustainability today, it must matter what the implications of these changes are and how they compromise the future reconfiguration of ways of life historically forged in collective praxis.