Contributions of Intercultural Socioenvironmental Justice to the 2030 Agenda in the Colombian Caribbean

Abstract

The 2030 Agenda has influenced the design of public policies in Colombia and other countries in the region, but there are many gaps in the way a global policy can be interpreted and adapted to the territories. Thus, this article aims to critically evaluate the public policy of sustainability implemented in the Colombian Caribbean and to suggest contributions from an intercultural socioenvironmental justice perspective. For this purpose, the public policy of sustainability that orients the plans for the use of insular ecosystems in Cartagena de Indias has been examined and confronted with local evidence that shows significant changes in the forms of life and ecological degradation in multi-temporally analysed coverages. Methodologically, this research is based on three aspects: the theoretical discussion of the notions of sustainability and justice in public policies, spatial databases to analyse the transformation of landscapes and ethnographic work with Afro-descendant peoples to recognise their socioecological systems. We found that the public policy of territorial planning aligned with the 2030 Agenda nominally includes a rights approach, but management practices or governance structures do not consider the very high asymmetry in land tenure, the growing private and non-participatory regulation of coasts and the sea or the exclusion of Afro-descendant peoples who claim tenure and autonomy rights. Then, we propose integrated dimensions of sustainability that overcome the socioecological negativity observed and articulate criteria of intercultural justice in public, social and environmental policies.

1. Introduction

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are an ambitious set of 17 goals and 169 targets that were defined and developed through an unprecedented conversation between UN member states and local authorities, civil society, the private sector and other stakeholders. Several researchers have analysed the implementation criteria and contextualisation at the regional and local scales [1,2,3]. In the Caribbean, for example, as a result of analyses of social inequality, socioenvironmental conflict and institutional weakness, it is imperative to adequately localise the SDGs by recognising existing barriers in local and regional governments and the deficit in social participation in development policies [4,5]. One of the most neglected issues in sustainability policies is the relationship between the rights of Caribbean coastal and fishing communities and the protection of marine life (SDG 14). A dualistic analysis seems to prevail that places ocean conservation on one side and the rights of fishing populations that face the rigorous challenges of climate variability on the other side. Studies such as Haughton [6] and Clay & Olson [7] have already noted the decline of fisheries and the impoverishment of communities that are highly dependent on the sea.

It is important to recognise that the meanings that have been assigned to sustainability are diverse, so it is necessary to identify the concepts and practices that underlie policies that adopt notions of sustainable development in their design and implementation [1,8]. A case that allows for a critical examination of the scope of sustainability is the Colombian Caribbean, a region in which various policies overlap. On the one hand, the state has reinforced protected areas in marine–coastal ecosystems, and on the other hand, on the same coasts, real estate and hotel growth has led to a relaxation of the land market and the issuance of environmental licences that have enabled large parts of the coastlines to be transformed into areas of urban expansion for tourism use. Both conservation and hotel growth policies have generated a framework of conflict with local communities that aspire to have their rights to land and sea recognised and, thus, to facilitate their equitable participation in the decisions that transform the region and compromise their present and future way of life.

The case of Barú shows that the struggle for sustainability—that is, the effort to make a community’s way of life viable and enduring in an integral sense—is not the same as sustained or sustainable development in the terms in which public policy offers it to local communities. Tourism, conservation and real estate growth on the coasts, as will be shown, are aligned with the interpretation that the Colombian policy model applies to sustainable development. Therefore, differentiating sustainable development from sustainability is crucial [9], because the data show that the model adopted on the Caribbean coasts is unsustainable from a human and ecological point of view. The search for sustainability implies sociohistorical reflexivity regarding what is viable and what is not. Additionally, sustainability is not merely instrumental [10], since the subjects have built a model of occupation and use of nature that is based on the feasibility or reproducibility of their way of life, knowledge of the biophysical environment, commitment to future generations and affirmation of their way of life in the midst of many adversities.

In this context, the objectives of this research are: first, to critically evaluate the public policy of sustainability in the Caribbean, especially those related to the planning and management of coasts and seas; second, to analyse the changes in the island’s ecosystems based on a multitemporal study that enables a biophysical verification of the state of the ecosystems and drivers of transformation; third, to delve into the systems of use of Afro-descendant people who inhabit the island and their perceptions and interactions with the public policies that are implemented in the region; fourth, to articulate an analytical framework of intercultural socioenvironmental justice that we consider necessary after analysis of the public policies and empirical evidence from the case study; and fifth, to offer analytical and practical guidelines for public policy to more adequately assemble the ecological, social and cultural sustainability, with a serious consideration of the socioecological systems and rights of communities that are affected by the design of public and private development strategies that tend to be imposed. Thus, this research presents an in-depth analysis of a conceptual framework to analyse how certain public policies of the Colombian state apply to these territories and their implications at the biophysical, social and cultural levels in regions such as the Caribbean with ecological fragility and settlements of ancestral peoples along the coasts. Achieving sustainability requires a more horizontal understanding that takes into account the socio-diverse communities that can contribute to the goals of the 2030 Agenda.

Beyond a common dispute in the sphere of environmental governance, the Caribbean shows that these problems involve profound social differences and various actors’ valuations of the nature of common goods and how to incorporate them into economic development and conservation models. The processes of conservation and real estate development in the hotel sector are advancing in parallel with public policies that enable their consolidation. However, the agenda for the recognition of collective tenure rights is not advancing, even though Colombia ratified the ILO Convention 169 on the rights of indigenous and tribal peoples in 1991. Regardless of its legal commitments, the state has implemented a regressive approach in interpreting and recognising communities of the islands and Caribbean coasts that do not have legal security for their lands or areas of preferential use. This approach has generated intercultural conflict, because policies developed under the protection of discourses that pretend to combine sustainability and development do not respect the historical rights of these communities, leading to asymmetrical intercultural conflict between the state and traditional communities. Thus, the situation of legal pluralism that is expressed in Caribbean coastal communities’ own rights and in the legal capacity of the state is not equitable.

There are two distinct cultural strategies. On the one hand, the state, together with the private sector, dissociates conservation and economic growth from the collective rights of the communities that have ancestrally inhabited the coasts. On the other hand, the strategy of the communities does not dissociate the conservation of nature from the practice of their rights in their way of life, which has coexisted with the marine–coastal ecosystems and, despite certain limitations, allowed them to harmonise their practices with ecological sustainability to a great degree. Responses to the challenge of environmental conservation, together with the promotion of dignified ways of life, lead to diverse cultural strategies that articulate different social identities, which must be examined for both correctness and sustainability before nature, society and equity with other communities are affected by the strategies.

2. Theoretical Framework

2.1. Environmental Crisis and Conservation in Coastal–Marine-Protected Areas

While biodiversity conservation is a necessity to ensure the structure and functionality of ecosystems [11], it must always be linked to the needs of local stakeholders and their historical or circumstantial relationship with areas affected by protected area declarations [12]. In the follow-up to SDG 14, the seas and marine resources are recognised as a key indicator insofar as the oceans cover three-quarters of the Earth’s surface, support 5% of global GDP, directly and indirectly generate nearly 200 million jobs and, therefore, have the potential to contribute to food security [13].

Climate change, overfishing, marine pollution and a growing list of other anthropogenic factors threaten the oceans. Many marine environments are approaching or have reached their critical tipping points, and rising ocean temperatures and sea levels are projected to push ecosystems to their points of no return. This trend has been clear since the first global integrated assessment of the marine environment, and it is even more pronounced in the data presented in the most recent UN assessment [14,15]. Among the environmental problems of greatest concern for the use of the sea are aggregations of Sargassum algae (Sargassum natans and fluitans species) [16].

From the perspective of ocean use, a Lancet report details the variations and increases in the sea surface temperature, which pose a threat to seafood productivity, in the territorial waters of 95 countries [17]. In fact, the catch of marine fish has decreased since 1988, while the production of farmed fish has increased. This contrasts with the per capita fish consumption, which has increased steadily since 1960; in fact, the report notes that approximately 3.3 billion people, especially those living in coastal countries, depend on seafood. Regarding coastal countries, such as those of the Greater Caribbean, the Lancet report states that, of the 146 million people living in coastal areas, 27% are living in minimal development conditions.

2.2. Intercultural Socioenvironmental Justice and Territorial Rights

We consider it necessary to introduce and articulate a third dimension, intercultural justice, in addition to the dimensions of social and environmental justice, in a visible and operative way. These three dimensions are operationalised in the analysis of public policy, the transformation of ecosystems and the social impact of communities, along with their contributions to the SDG targets, since their ways of life and sustainable practices are based on nearly three centuries of historical experience on the island.

Thus, intercultural justice requires a context of social and cultural pluralism. This implies the right of communities or peoples who have a different way of life because of a historical practice of cultural self-determination not to be discriminated against in comparison to other social actors who may in fact be favoured by public development policies. Additionally, they have the right to be actors in their own model of human development. This implies not only consultations on public decisions that affect their territory and way of life but also the capacity to make autonomous decisions about these issues.

At the same time, the systematic articulation of socioenvironmental justice with intercultural justice makes it possible to recognise and evaluate the specific contributions and responsibilities of each group and its way of life or development in terms of the common challenges of society and humanity as a whole, as well as the ecological challenges of the planet. Therefore, the intended corrections of the demands of different groups or social actors must be evaluated systematically and considered in an integrated and inseparable manner for the sake of internal equity and equity within the group itself and correctness in relation to nature and ecological sustainability. Additionally, it must not prevent other sustainable ways of life of groups affected by their own demands or the particular intended model of social development [10].

In recent decades, a growing global awareness of inequities in human development for broad sectors of global society and an ecological crisis at the planetary level has emerged. The two problems can no longer be perceived or addressed in an unconnected manner, since public responses at different scales should not prescribe strategies dividing these two dimensions that negatively affect social existence. Therefore, we must consider a socioenvironmental crisis that, in various ways, weakens and threatens natural life and human ways of life, especially among social groups that suffer the greatest inequalities. This requires not only a factual but also an ethical recognition of the interdependence between nature and human communities. The articulation of just and sustainable relations within each society also requires the recognition of a sphere of duties towards nature and other living beings. However, precisely because of this interdependence, damage to nature also affects communities, especially the poorest and most vulnerable, and their sustainability [18]. Therefore, social justice today goes hand-in-hand with environmental justice, forming an inseparable construct.

In this context, we briefly point out some milestones where demands for justice have articulated and integrated social and environmental justice due to the inseparable correlation with human existence.

Environmental justice implies analysing the historical configuration of a territory, identifying the link between the ecological and political structures of environmental conflicts and carefully reviewing the economic, political, sociocultural and historical variables that underlie environmental conflicts [19]. This process incorporates variables such as social, economic and racial equity into not only the natural base but also the ways in which the territory is created and administered [20]. In a field that seeks an equitable distribution of environmental burdens and benefits across society, therefore, individual and collective recognition of the needs, capacities and identities of the affected communities is required to ensure their effective participation in the decisions that affect them [19]. This is a precondition for a process of redistributing access to natural resources and pollution burdens.

Environmental justice is closely related to ecological distributive conflicts, since this type of conflict involves access to and regulation of a set of common goods that are disputed by various actors with unequal power relations [20,21]. Such conflict can be explained by, among other factors, the mercantilist valuation of nature that leads to regimes of the invisibility of ecosystems and those who inhabit them as imaginaries and ways of life are imposed that reduce these ecosystems and communities through an economic and exploitative rationality [22].

However, the relationships and levels of justice are not only articulated internally within each community in terms of the necessary equity among its respective members and in its dealings with nature but also must be recognised before the affected ones, before the plurality of communities and, when necessary, in terms of different ways of life. Thus, the justice that articulates each society is also at stake in “external” relations [23]. A context of social and cultural pluralism exists both internally, in states such as Colombia, and internationally. This pluralism is not usually accompanied by relations of effective mutual recognition but is crossed by forms of power that articulate the hegemony of some groups over others and that distort and prevent equity between communities and their particular identities and ways of life.

According to Rodríguez [24], Colombia has incorporated into public policy cross-cutting pacts that address sustainability by proposing producing by conserving and conserving by producing. These pacts are associated with the goals of responsible production and consumption, climate action (SDG 13), the life of terrestrial ecosystems (SDG 15) and affordable and non-polluting energy (SDG 7).

Thus, the development of public policies aligned with the 2030 Agenda, at both the national and international levels, requires the involvement of all those affected. All stakeholders should be included in the validation of development and sustainability policies, especially in regard to the management and governance of common goods, which are an essential part of the territorial rights of Afro-Colombian peoples.

The specialised literature uses the term common-pool resources to refer to a set of ecosystems that are used by groups of actors who build adaptive relationships governed by formal and informal institutions, i.e., formal as in rules and norms, such as laws, and informal as in explicit or tacit behavioural agreements [25]. The commons are characterised by the difficulty of excluding anyone from them and by the reduction in the availability of resource units as more people or groups use them [26,27]. This implies that many actors, not always under the same economic conditions or with the same possibility of exercising power, access and use or restrict the use of resources in different ways.

The theoretical debate on the effective management of common-pool resources and their sustainability covers several spectra. On the one hand, state institutionality and the promotion of centralised rules are increasing, and on the other hand, the commons are being privatised [28]. In contrast to the dichotomy of public and private, the idea of protecting collective management systems through local regulatory arrangements has emerged as a strategy for resource conservation [26,29]. It is essential to investigate the privatisation of environmental goods and services, which, in the literature, is associated with enclosures, exclusion and commodification of ecosystems, as a nodal concept in this research [30,31]. The privatisation of land for the implementation of projects that benefit groups translates into inequality [32].

In addition, the tension between collective property and private property has been the subject of interdisciplinary analyses that differentiate between property and rights to resources. On the one hand, ownership implies formality, since rules are established and protected by states [33], and although it encompasses a set of rights that qualify tenure (open access and communal property), it can be classified as public or private [34]. Natural resources are associated with rights of access, extraction, management, exclusion, and alienation [35], which are determining factors in nested systems of use and governance. The approach based on the relationship between culture and law, such as legal pluralism, which emphasises native peoples’ own laws and customary practices that articulate or clash with formal normative systems of states with multiculturalist doctrines, is no less important [22].

One of the challenges of public policy on common goods in the context of the discourses and practices of sustainability in recent years—Ostrom detailed this challenge well into the 2000s—is the inexorable task of undertaking systematic institutional evaluations given the transformations of the problems; the positions of the actors; the patterns of interaction and the adaptive rules when confronting problems of degradation of natural systems, overexploitation, corruption and marginalisation. In addition, several authors have insisted on a transdisciplinary approach to the study of the commons and its contribution to sustainability [36,37].

3. Materials and Methods

3.1. The Colombian Caribbean as a Case Study: Barú as a Collective Space since Colonial Times

In the Colombian Caribbean, the region where the empirical cases of this research are located, there are communal lands and other common-pool resources, such as savannah and low-tide areas in the insular zone. Geographical, environmental, legal and economic studies have pointed out that these areas are characterised by richness in the functionality of their ecosystems and by being the ancestral lands of ethnic groups, mostly Afro-descendant populations [38]. However, these studies have considered the privatisation of spaces for community use and the degradation of resources that provide sustenance to native populations, particularly access to water, to be among the main problems [39,40]. In summary, the irruption of private use of collective territories is an important axis of discussion in the study of the sustainability of common-pool resources and development models.

It is well-known that the tourism industry is important in the Caribbean [41]. Much of the degradation of mangroves and other problems detailed below is the result of excessive use of coastlines for the hotel and real estate industries, which have represented and commodified the Caribbean as uninhabited leisure beaches [42]. One of these emblematic places is the island of Barú, located south of Cartagena. It is a region that has historically experienced tension between native populations and other private and state actors. Almost all disputes are related to the use, distribution, control of and access to environmental goods and services in the continental area and in the extensive marine space that constitutes the territoriality of the baruleros. This space is a maritorium, in the term of Ivelic & Segura [43], meaning a habitable sea without land as a limit or an obstacle.

To plan urban and rural land use in Colombia, regional governments have created land use plans and development plans. These instruments have served as the basis for the incorporation of the SDGs into local governance and are, to a great extent, the basis for the report that the state is preparing to follow up on the adoption of the 2030 Agenda in its domestic policy. A review of the Land Use Plan of Cartagena de Indias, one of the most important cities in the country and the Greater Caribbean, shows that its political, economic, and the administrative planning model is disconnected from the socioecological reality of the islands and coastal areas, because, among other reasons, it does not recognise that these are spaces inhabited by native communities. This plan was formulated 21 years ago, and recent studies have estimated that it is an insufficient instrument for 72.7% (32 out of 44) of the evaluated items [44].

Barú was not an island until 1649, when it was separated from the mainland by the construction of the Dique Canal. It is surrounded by the Bay of Cartagena and the Bay of Barbacoas and is inhabited by five Afro-descendant communities organised through legal instruments that have existed in Colombia since the proclamation of Law 70 of 1993, also known as the Black Communities Law. The immediate context is the Corales del Rosario National Natural Park, which, today, has 120,000 hectares of mangrove forests on the coastline and marine area under this figure of protection and is mainly in the immediate vicinity of the community of Barú1. Since 2009, the inhabitants of this region have led important organisational movements in efforts to inscribe their ways of life, their territories and their political stakes in the framework of identity politics [45].

Anthropologist Carlos Duran broadly analysed the importance of the organisational life of the baruleros and the early achievement of the seven caballerías of land that today represent, above all, a symbolic foundation of a struggle that has not ceased2. Duran (2007) affirmed that the community was organised around social, economic and cultural dynamics that differ from those propagated by the mestizo nation of capitalist development. The community continues to have serious difficulties in being recognised by the state for various reasons, including the rebellious character of the palenqueros and arrochelados [46].

In 1851, the year in which slavery was abolished in Colombia, the Afro-descendant settlers of Barú bought seven caballerías that were part of this territory; the local community retains the memory of the immense work that it undertook to pay the 1200 pesos that were the price of these lands. Wilmer Gómez, a leader and cultural manager of the community, affirmed, “These lands were bought by 5 neighbours of Barú in representation of the whole community; they bought them on 19 June 1850, and finished paying on 27 May 1851”. The collective character of these lands fell on the acquired caballerías, where these five baruleros yielded, renounced and transferred in favour of all the inhabitants of the town the right to use and enjoy them. The public deed itself states that “the mentioned lands in no time can become private property, nor patrimony of any person or family”.

In this way, access to land was guaranteed for the entire community located in Figure 1 in an attempt to avoid what would inevitably happen years later: the individual appropriation of land. Today, Barú has a population of approximately 3000, and communal lands are scarce. The people live on an estuary protected by mangroves amidst coasts that have been privatised for the use of hotels and the luxury houses of people from outside the community. Their main common good is the Caribbean Sea, since fishing and sailing are historical practices of this community.

Faced with the imminent loss of land and marine areas, in 2017, the community of Barú asked the Colombian state to award it approximately 2400 hectares as collective lands and requested that the state recognise the coasts and the sea as areas of preferential use. Community leaders inventoried the main fishing areas and estimated for at least 19,000 miles the areas of maritime use for navigation routes, links with neighbouring peoples and, in general, the sustenance of their ways of life. After many legal and social tensions, the Colombian state has still not responded substantively to the community’s request, which is inexplicable given that this community has been present in the territory for more than 300 years and has a property deed dating back to 1851. The state claims that this deed is no longer valid and that, today, the entire island is owned by people who are mostly from outside the community [47].

3.2. Methodology

The methodological strategy combined spatial analysis of coverage; analysis of cadastral mapping for tenure status and structures; fieldwork guided by focus groups, semi-structured interviews and questionnaires [48] and a documentary review of Caribbean environmental public policy aligned with the 2030 Agenda. All interviewees were fully informed about the scope and main objective of the research, as well as the subsequent use and dissemination of the collected information. Prior to the interviews and focus groups, voluntary and informed consent was requested, and the anonymity and privacy of the interviewees were guaranteed. In the community of Barú, there are currently approximately 250 fishermen, all men; fieldwork was carried out with 142 fishermen and other members of the community who are authorities of the community council. A total of 4 focus groups and 22 interviews were conducted between July and August 2021, differentiating fishermen associations and specialties by type of fishing practice and fishing gear (divers, live-bait fishing, medium and large species fishing—Serranidae family—and mollusc gatherers).

In this methodological design, various techniques were used to identify and contrast qualitative, spatial and documentary information. Thus, different levels and scales of analysis were used to identify which approaches to sustainability are followed by environmental public policies in the Colombian Caribbean and what the associated practices and effects are (see

Table A4. Levels and scales of analysis to identify sustainability approaches in environmental public policies in the Colombian Caribbean.

Scales	Levels of Analysis	Materials	Methods
National (Colombia)	Degree of incorporation of environmental, social and intercultural dimensions into the formulation of goals and projection of policies aligned with the 2030 Agenda	- Public policy documents - Follow-up reports - Government plans and land-use plans formulated as of 2015 (as a milestone in the formulation of the SDGs)	Documentary review and contrast of sources based on categories of analysis
Regional (Cartagena Island region)
Local (Barú Island)	Environmental, social and cultural sustainability policies actually implemented Effects of 2030 Agenda public policies on local livelihoods	- Satellite images for analysis of land-cover status - Socioenvironmental diagnoses formulated by state environmental authorities and management plans formulated by the communities	Land cover analysis through the multitemporal contrast of satellite images available for the analysed island (using ArcGIS software)
Microscales (spaces for collective use)	- Common property use practices - Implications of community livelihoods	Systematisation of interviews and focus groups with fishermen and other inhabitants of the island	Focus groups (4), semi-structured interviews (22) with a scope of 142 people contacted

in Appendix A). For this purpose, the results of fieldwork with fishermen’s organisations and leaders of the ethnic authorities of Barú allowed us to contrast the ways in which the city’s management plans, coastal area management plans and ocean regulation plans have been operationalised. Additionally, policy frameworks have been formulated since 2011 and reformulated under the guidelines of Agenda 2030 in 2015 and 2021. Likewise, an ecosystemic analysis was based on a review of the state of land cover on the island that emerged from the spatial analysis. The results are presented according to the prioritisation of dimensions of justice for the analysis.

In the spatial analysis, this region emerged as a diverse coastal landscape with ecosystems of high conservation value, such as mangroves and tropical dry forest. These ecosystems are increasingly vulnerable due to tenure and use conflicts that were documented in the research from satellite images of 1987, 2004 and 2017 available for processing and analysis through ArcGIS software and contrasted with other research from the region [47,49,50].

4. Results

The results of this research are structured in three levels of analysis according to the objectives. First, the ethnographic work provided an in-depth reading of the social and ecological conflicts that have worsened with the new public policy models that favour conservation, real estate and hotel growth on the island but do not advance with equal speed in recognising the territorial rights of the Afro-descendant population. The next level of structuring of the results details the quantitative biophysical evidence of land cover transformation, mainly the transition from natural coverage to intervened areas that show the degradation of essential natural systems for the livelihoods of local communities and the ecological stability of the island. Consequently, we show the findings of the critical review of public policy on sustainability at the national and regional levels, the goals of the Colombian state in terms of SDGs and the policy frameworks that were designed with a rights-based approach on the surface but disintegrate social, environmental and cultural criteria in practice

4.1. Socioecological Conflict from the Actors’ Point of View

Many of the conflicts that have made Barú a centre of disputes over land, coasts and natural resources have to do with the imbalance in the state’s regulation of the rights of use of native populations. Individual tenure and collective tenure rights are in serious confrontation. Márquez [38], Bolaños et al. [47] and the Observatorio de Territorios Étnicos [51] typified the main conflicts in Barú and proposed differentiating those originating from land sales from those originating from private and state investment projects, such as the creation of the Corales del Rosario National Natural Park. In addition, the influence of private actors must be considered given the tourism boom and the construction of luxury houses since the late 1970s.

Today, the island of Barú is a landscape in which the dispossession and enclosure of the public is palpable, as stated by its inhabitants and as shown by the aerial photographs on Figure 2. The inhabitants have lost the best beaches and access to the sea, which has uprooted a community of fishermen and damaged the socioecological systems of fishing and agriculture. Both agriculture and fishing production declined in the 1980s, when land sales increased, national park restrictions and prohibitions were strictly enforced and the inhabitants of Barú found new jobs in tourism and hotel construction. The testimonies summarised in

Table 1. Synthesis of focus groups with fishermen.

Dimensions of Justice	Ecological	Social	Intercultural
Changes perceived by the local community related to territorial conflicts	In Barú, everyone was a fisherman. Until the 1990s, the average fisherman caught up to 10 kilos, and 20 kilos in the most productive months. Species such as jack mackerel and snapper were available with little catch effort. As there were no tourist boats or jet skis, there was little noise in the sea, and the fish were not chased away. Yes, there were luxury houses on the coasts, but they had not closed the mangrove swamp, nor had they prohibited the people from approaching the ports to catch live bait. What affected fishing the most is that the luxury houses and hotels made artificial beaches and removed sea grasses, causing serious damage. Additionally, agriculture has decreased by 80%, according to the focus group: “Barú Island became one of the main suppliers of agricultural products to Cartagena; we regularly sent boats and sailboats with tomatoes, loquats and bananas”.	The arrival of new inhabitants to the island generated many changes in the forms of local organisation. Most shocking was that the native population was considered cheap labour, and their historical presence and way of life were not valued. The new owners of the island closed the beach areas that had always been spaces for community use. Most properties with access to the sea to which wealthy families from the interior of the country arrived meant the loss of the coast, the beach, and the mangroves because these owners did not allow the presence of the natives except for those who were hired for service work. The community does not understand why the state allowed beaches, coasts, and mangroves to be appropriated by private individuals and hotels.	Local communities enjoy constitutional recognition and differential rights. The community authorities know this and enforce it, but in very asymmetrical contexts of power. A leader commented in the focus group, “As authorities of the territory, we are called to prior consultation. It is a right and an obligation of the state to carry it out for any project on the island that affects us. The problem is that the consultation has become a procedure for the community to approve the project; we are not considered, and the project cannot be modified even when we have warned that it could be harmful to the community. That is why many people say that prior consultation is a mere formality”. This ignoring of the subjectivity of the fishermen and, in general, of the entire native community has led to the loss of identity references as a community. According to the focus group, “Already many young people want to be employees of the hotels and are not interested in the history and life project of the community”.

Sources: Data obtained during fieldwork, 2021.

show the tensions that are real obstacles to a sustainability agenda that exists only in public policy documents and the discursive framework of the state.

In contrast to the narratives and perceptions of fishermen and community members, the state has prioritised other dimensions of the SDG targets on the basis of a technocratic and instrumental knowledge system that involves little dialogue with local and ecological realities such as those of Barú. The follow-up report of the Colombian state presented in 2021 is proof [13]. In this report, the SDGs with the greatest progress are 6 (clean water and sanitation), 8 (decent work and economic growth) and 14 (undersea life). However, fieldwork and the interpretation of satellite images show that in the region analysed, there is no access to aqueducts or sewage systems, and employment of the population is reduced to sporadic hiring in the hotel sector, so SDGs 6 and 8 are still far from the targets. Regarding SDG 14, as explained in Section 4.3. the Colombian government reported some targets as being 100% in compliance by focusing its analysis only on the creation of protected areas.

4.2. Ecosystem Status

Regarding ecological sustainability, the data are convincing.

Table 2. Hedging analysis.

Land Cover	1987 (Ha)	2004 (Ha)	2017 (Ha)
Dense shrubland	1,081,833	851,562	419,169
Dense highly floodable forest	1,002,868	765,026	850,652
Recreational facilities	0	26,069	31,482
Discontinuous urban fabric	0	14,823	60,530

Sources: D satellite images of 1987, 2004 and 2017 available for processing and analysis through ArcGIS software.

shows that coastal land cover has decreased in terms of shrublands and floodable forests, while the urban fabric and recreational facilities have grown. Highly floodable forests showed a recovery in 2017 due to community reforestation processes and the actions of environmental authorities. In the marine area, artisanal fishing spots went from 98 to only 10 fishing areas where this activity can be practised. That is, between 1987 and 2021, the community lost access to approximately 90% of its marine territory.

The environmental analysis used satellite images from 1987, 2004 and 2017 to create multitemporal documentation of land-cover changes evidencing the loss of natural covers such as dense shrubs (tropical dry forest) and dense highly floodable forests (mangroves) and an increase in artificial covers such as recreational facilities and discontinuous urban fabric. Table 1 shows the evolution of private establishments closely related to the invasion of traditional community lands. This pattern of privatisation in coastal areas has direct impacts on the community’s livelihood systems, as the Barú people are essentially a fishing community that currently has restricted access to maritime areas.

According to the fieldwork, what best explains the loss of access to fishing resources is a combination of environmental regulations, the tourism boom and the consolidation of hotels and luxury houses that have privatised the coasts and navigation lines.

Figure 2 shows that most of the areas available to the community are in the interior of the island. Regarding the traditional roads that show access to the sea, three are in dispute with private owners from outside the community. The map shows that, except for the extreme southeast (points 21 and 22 on the map), there are no places for community use on the edges of the sea.

4.3. Competing Strategies and Governance

National public policies and local governance instruments in the Caribbean incorporate a rights-based approach at the rhetorical level, i.e., they are formulated with inclusive language, but in practice, there is no intercultural dialogue. For example, the Land Management Plan (POT for the Spanish acronym)3 takes a general perspective that the territory is an attractive platform on which to structure an economic development model but neglects other dimensions of sustainability. In this framework, any development is subordinated to the guarantee and viability of national and regional objectives. The general objective for Cartagena is stated as follows: “to ensure its vocation as a tourist center of the Caribbean, a competitive international port and an industrial city that promotes the reactivation of the rural area and favours the development of commerce and support services for the productive sectors” [52].

The planning and land use instruments mention “strengthening and integration of cultural identity” and “integration of the environmental dimension”, but the loss of the identity of Afro-Caribbean communities is becoming increasingly serious and could be irreversible within a few years, as shown by anthropological studies in this region [38,40,46] It seems senseless to subordinate the cultural identity of the native communities to their previous integration, to the governmental system and to the actions and macroprojects of the POT. How can native communities be valued in this way? Is the POT or the institutional planning of rural space a possible scenario of articulation to process disputes over common goods? The displacement of activities due to changes in land use has forced the inhabitants to modify or disregard their ancestral practices.

The collapse of agriculture and fishing in favour of tourism or jobs in large companies has radically changed ways of life in Afro-descendant communities. The general objectives of the POT are a proposal for the development of rural and suburban land to facilitate territorial integration and articulation between different economic sectors of the district, with the rural component inserted into and subordinate to the general component of the plan. Such territorial integration points to a standardisation of models and regulations that is contrary to the rights-based approaches that these public policies rhetorically claim to follow. Empirical evidence shows that the articulation of different territorialities and ways of life is not sought; rather, the approach is to subordinate the territoriality of the natives to a general planning vision.

The guarantee of development of the life plans and use models that the communities seek to defend remains uncertain, limiting the implementation of their own or local forms of planning with greater levels of autonomy in the management of ecosystems. The constitutional rights of Afro-descendant communities appear to be insufficient; they are in open conflict with the objectives and planning systems that are said to be inclusive and aligned with the 2030 Agenda. These communities have access to the management plans only as guests who are invited to discuss territorial distributions and systems of use, as stated in the focus groups in Table 1. There is no figure or space where there is a dialogue on the initial objectives to be resolved by the planning. This fissure is especially problematic in relation to Afro-descendant communities with widely recognised rights. There is no recognition that governance is a function of the self-determination process.

The 2030 Agenda in the Colombian Caribbean Sea

Colombia has a robust strategy for the implementation of the SDGs4. It has a system of strategies, monitoring, reporting and accountability that is based on dialogue with stakeholders in the different territories of the nation. In formal terms, the strategy is well-conceived in terms of operability and access to information. However, it could be improved if a model of intercultural environmental justice were adopted in socioecological spaces that require it, for example, in community territories of the Caribbean, spaces of common use or public goods inhabited by native communities that, in most cases, have not received formal recognition of their presence.

Colombia presented a follow-up report on compliance with the SDGs up to 2021. The overall percentage of SDG progress in Colombia was 72.58%, according to the official report recently published by the government [13], with 54.83% progress towards the 2030 target. The goals with the greatest lag in terms of meeting the annual targets were SDG 2 (zero hunger), 10 (reducing inequalities) and 13 (climate action). Surprisingly, SDG 14 was the only one for which 100% progress towards the annual target and the 2030 target had been achieved. This is due to the strong conservationist approach to constructing the indicators of this commitment. The indicators measured the percentage of marine water monitoring stations with an acceptable to optimal Marine Water Quality Index (MWQI) category and hectares of marine protected areas. Although these are highly relevant indicators, there was no measurement of the processes of social appropriation of the seas, the sustenance of marine life for artisanal fisheries and the socioecological crisis facing the marine environment. Therefore, these parameters are incomplete, because they do not monitor the local populations that live on the sea and whose livelihoods are based on marine resources.

The Caribbean is a shared sea, since, due to its environmental and social affinities, it has been recognised as a unit by the United Nations Environment Program and, since 1992, has been called the Greater Caribbean or Caribbean Basin. As an ecosystem, it is an extensive region of the Western Atlantic that has a complex geological history. It encompasses the entire Gulf of Mexico and the northern coast of Brazil [53].

Public policies within the framework of sustainability must situate the Caribbean as a unit and consider integral actions among the countries of this great basin [54]. Many factors of ecological fragility are facing this ocean owing to the influence of hydrometeorological phenomena that degrade agricultural production soils. For example, the impact of water temperature change on coral reefs has led to a phenomenon known as bleaching, which leads to the loss of the structure and functionality of corals. In addition, water pollution problems have resulted from industrial discharges, increases in the amount of solid waste and the enclosure and privatisation of beaches and coastlines, which affect the structure and functionality of ecosystems, especially due to tourism.

The impacts of the degradation of natural systems are perceived in the livelihoods of the Caribbean population, and the collapse of fishing systems that have generated serious food security problems since the 1980s is of concern. Dependence on food imports ranged from 40% to 70% in Caribbean countries as of 2021, according to FAO data [55]. Therefore, it is not surprising that hunger is increasing in coastal areas and that SDG 2 has the greatest lag in Colombia.

5. Discussion

To move towards a sustainability that integrates the dimensions of justice, it is convenient to start at the beginning: understanding the territorial reality of the communities and establishing consensual objectives and plans. The shortcomings of Cartagena’s territorial and environmental planning instruments should therefore be addressed and resolved in any proposal to be approved in participatory scenarios guided by intercultural socioenvironmental justice. For this reason, the following is a discussion of imbalances in the sustainability model that Colombian public policy has designed and applied in this part of the Caribbean, taking the case into account to suggest and support improvements in the model.

5.1. A Disappearing Way of Life

Artisanal fishing is the basis of the baruleros’ traditional knowledge of the sea and navigation. However, fishing is in crisis in much of the Caribbean. Variations in water temperature, agrochemical pollution, urbanisation without environmental planning, the removal of marine ecosystems and, finally, tourism are some of the causes that have been pointed out by experts on the subject, who identify fish as one of the most threatened taxonomic groups in the area [56].

In Barú, conflicts over common goods or natural resources are caused by access to legitimate tenure rights in the face of actions that may threaten them, as stated by the FAO: “Private and collective tenure are limited by the rights of others and by measures adopted by States for purposes of general interest. Such measures should be determined by law only for the purpose of promoting the common welfare, in particular the protection of the environment” [57].

Not even the creation of the protected area has allowed sea grasses and corals to recover. In fact, highly conflictive situations have arisen between natives and park authorities due to the unequal application of environmental legislation. As Gudynas stated [58], environmental conflict involves the availability of and access to natural resources and is framed within confrontations that occur in the public space between organised collective actors with different environmental perceptions, values or perspectives. Such conflict undoubtedly involves states and their environmental policies.

All these conflicts have the same effect, and the privatisation of public lands, whether reserved wastelands and/or places of traditional use by the baruleros, is an authentic spatial injustice. According to spatial and cadastral data, the main land sales in areas of special environmental protection have occurred in places that have access to the sea, generating mangrove clearing and filling of marshes and other bodies of water.

All of this has serious implications for the conservation of ecosystem services, as the filling of beaches and cutting of mangroves have direct effects on the general state of the ecosystems that contribute to the maintenance of fisheries, the containment of coastal erosion and the conservation of biodiversity in permanent or temporary habitats for important species.

One of the major problems of the tourism boom on the island is the change in rural land use on the lands that are the traditional territory of Barú. The public policies through which these decisions are adopted allow the development of diverse economic activities in the territories. In 1993, 140 hectares of the island were declared a tourist-free zone. In 2005, the national government issued guidelines for the country’s largest tourism project in the Playa Blanca sector, which has generated many conflicts between the state, businesspeople and natives over ownership of the land and use of the beaches, which are essential to one of the traditional livelihoods of many families in the native communities.

As of 2021, more than 45 public–private investment projects had been identified on the island; of these, the inhabitants considered that 30 were generating greater pressure on the limited spaces available for the natives. Even with the achievements in prior consultation as a protection mechanism, the businesspeople–state–communities relationship continues to be very unequal, as do the environmental impacts and contradictions, with respect to the possibility of safeguarding territorial rights and local governance of natural resources.

The rise of tourism has proletarianised the islanders’ way of life, which was formerly autonomous. This implies dependence for the inhabitants on the companies that have control over the economic activity and, therefore, implies an asymmetrical social relationship. Thus, we can recognise greater justice in a greater capacity for self-determination in the economic sphere not only in a political and cultural sense but also in real equality for these members of society in relation to other actors.

Fieldwork with the fishermen of Barú has enabled us to accompany the reflective exercises led by the community authorities (community council) from a collaborative approach based on academic knowledge. Although the capacity of scientific work in political transformations is limited, the results of this type of research contribute instruments and other points of view to the advocacy strategies of the communities with the state, the private sector and their own members.

5.2. Half-Hearted Justice

The Barú community was closed to outsiders for decades after the collective title was granted in 1851. The strategy was to conserve the territory: to remain and not give outsiders an opportunity to take it, even if this implied some drastic measures. Barú community leader Wilmer Gómez recalled, “At that time there were only baruleros in the territory because they would not let you marry outsiders. It was like a condition to maintain the territory” (interview, 2021). This helped to strengthen community life, as reflected in agrofood practices where planting was done without wires and with natural boundaries such as painted trees. In Barú, it is said that, at least until 1940, people owned the harvest but not the land; the land belonged to everyone [46].

Together and on a daily basis, the inhabitants were defining the community use of places within and outside the town. The coconut bonanza began at the end of the 1860s and lasted for more than 80 years. It not only energised the economic life of the inhabitants but also became a strategy for the occupation and settlement of neighbouring lands, such as Islas del Rosario and the San Bernardo Archipelago, where barulero farmers arrived to plant and care for the crops and then settled permanently [46].

The coconut crisis in 1950 reinforced fishing and the arrival of large tourism investors to buy the lands of peasants who were desperate because of large losses on their farms and the lack of state support. This situation generated the main conflicts that still exist today in the region. These conflicts are based on socioenvironmental inequality in accessing the best ecologically endowed areas: access to fresh water, access to beaches, better-drained areas and the presence of mangroves and other forest cover.

At present, the native communities of Barú and the neighbouring islands that have participated in prior consultation scenarios believe that reformulating the public policy of sustainable development is indispensable, since it does not fit in the same equation as promoting private investment and conservation areas and excluding local communities. That is not what the 2030 Agenda is about or what the SDGs are aiming for. The commodification of ecosystems that reinforces inequality does not contribute to sustainability.

In this reformulation or reimagining of public policies for sustainable development, based on Ostrom’s postulates [26], access to information is crucial. For example, local communities must have comprehensive data to understand the implications of state and native community lands for multinational hotel companies. If access to information is partial and unbalanced as a result of ill-considered prior consultations between the state, private actors and the community, as Ostrom stated, actors must make choices based on incomplete knowledge of all possible alternatives and their likely outcomes.

All this occurs in a contradictory universe, since the Colombian government promotes private investment as a way for the country’s economy to recover in the post-conflict scenario but neglects the socioenvironmental conflict resulting from the privatisation of common goods [59]. In the design of policies that are aligned with the 2030 Agenda, false social inclusion is evident since the autonomy of Afro-descendant communities is recognised. However, the participation and information of these communities are limited in the scenarios of large tourism investments in their ancestral lands. This design creates a whole arsenal for new social and ecological conflicts.

Thus, a problematising look at sustainability policy in the terms that intercultural socioenvironmental justice demands can contribute to the repertoires of Afro-descendant social movements, which generally address land claims and biodiversity conservation in an articulated manner. Currently, the main social movement in Colombia is the Proceso de Comunidades Negras (PCN for the Spanish acronym), which has managed to reposition the policy of collective land titling in the framework of the Peace Accord [60] and generated scientifically informed positions on climate vulnerability and the contribution of peoples to biodiversity conservation5. The community of Barú has participated in political processes promoted by the PCN, but the movement’s interest in the situation of coastal peoples and their claims for rights to the use of the sea remains scarce. Thus, this research can find areas of debate that contribute to the necessary transformations of environmental governance in the Caribbean.

5.3. Guidelines for Bringing Intercultural Socioenvironmental Justice Closer to Agenda 2030

From a critical perspective, in the implementation of the 2030 Agenda, the negations that can arise through public governance when other actors, points of view and integrated dimensions of sustainability are marginalised must be identified. In addition, this denial must be overcome through the integration of actors, perspectives and dimensions that are treated in a disjointed manner. To this end, certain guidelines are proposed to integrate critical factors (an improvement of contextual knowledge and implemented policies) and potential factors for a new action to overcome negations.

(1)

An expansion of the theoretical framework is necessary for the understanding of a critical analysis of SDG policies.

(2)

The social and cultural conflicts between the asymmetric actors (state, private sector, local community) existing in the territories of SDG implementation that cannot be uncovered through conventional analyses and that are reduced to public actions to achieve the SDG targets should be considered.

(3)

The implementation of policies aligned with the SDGs cannot disarticulate the systemic and co-dependent nature of the relationship between different goals and their targets.

(4)

The differentiated contributions of local communities with their own ways of life to the SDGs with respect to the contributions of states should be recognised. Therefore, it is a matter not only of allowing communities to participate but also of maintaining the capacity for the self-determination of culturally differentiated local actors in the orientation of local public policies.

In the specific case of Barú, the Colombian state is currently waiting to resolve the request for a collective title presented by the community. If the state grants this collective title, this would help provide a formal basis of recognition that would strengthen the roots, land tenure security and use of common goods from governance and integral sustainability schemes (tenure rights, recognition of the autonomy of the Afro-descendant community, dialogue between territoriality models, and the conservation of the social-ecological system).

As has been argued, Afro-Caribbean peoples do not have a vision of the territory that rejects conservation or economic growth [46]. On the contrary, they are aware of the degradation of the natural system and the decline of fishing. The arrival of the hotel and tourism sector has not only brought problems but also boosted the local economy. However, the models that have been implemented embody only partial sustainability. The community actors see the effective recognition of their rights stagnating, the ecosystem degrading and the state and other actors leaving them without the capacity to develop their own model of socioecological sustainability.

The guidelines for intercultural justice then result from the contrast between and critical examination of the two strategies: that of the state and private actors on the one hand and that of local communities on the other hand. There is intercultural justice when the way of life of the community that is affected by the public policies in question is not impeded. In a situation of power asymmetry, traditional community governance cannot be assured given the impossibility of imposing it by public coercion; thus, the recognition and cooperation of the state are required for its continuity. Although the state formally recognises the communities, at the same time, the full exercise of their rights is impeded because the state, with its conservation policies, limits the native population’s access to fishing and navigation zones and favours and legitimises the introduction of new actors from the private sector, which also impedes the collective way of life.

The systematic articulation of the three dimensions illustrated in Figure 3 represents a proposal to examine and guide marine–coastal public policies aligned with the 2030 Agenda in Colombia. The case of Barú shows that at all three levels, there are obstacles that prevent the integrated achievement of sustainability.

Governance arrangements are supposed to be mechanisms for addressing socioenvironmental crises and problems such as ecological-distributive issues [61], the degradation of natural systems, environmental justice or overexploitation. However, the intercultural character is often omitted from these environmental governance arrangements [10]. The Colombian Caribbean shows that problems of inequity in land distribution, a lack of participation in environmental policies, unequal distribution of rights to natural resources, human rights violations, food insecurity and exclusion of communities, among other factors, hinder the implementation of truly sustainable strategies. Exercises of power are determinant in environmental governance because the allocation, control and coordination of resources are influenced by the actors favoured in decision-making [62]. The rights of authority in decision-making associated with private property, in terms of power, favour those who formally own the land [63].

According to Arrieta [49], even if the community of Barú manages to persuade the Colombian state to issue the communal property title of the island, a large part of the spaces that were formerly areas of collective use have already been privatised. Privatisation has transformed the territory biophysically and has promoted other imaginaries among local inhabitants about the beaches. as well as notions of what is public and what is restricted. This new rationality that comes with private investment and that has used deforestation for the construction of hotels and recreational houses is changing the notion of the collective and fracturing community cohesion.

The study of common goods and multilevel governance tends to be based on a restrictive political theory in the understanding of inequalities and asymmetrical systems of rules and norms. The Caribbean cases, from which progress on the SDG targets is reported, do not include an adequate characterisation of the conflicts generated by the policy itself that allow little room for manoeuvring for native populations who are witnessing the materialisation of restrictive policies that degrade their livelihoods and ways of life.

Such degradation involves marine areas, or the maritorium (marine territory). Oceanic spaces are socioecological systems, so they cannot be monitored exclusively on the basis of data from meteorological stations or protected areas, as is currently reported in the degree of progress towards SDG 14. These places considered inhabited seas have deteriorated owing to factors such as over-occupation of the coasts, which increases the risk of flooding for local fishing populations.

The strategies analysed (state and private actors and community) define a space that is endowed with meaning and content as a way of articulating a social presence differentiated and differentiable by the mode of political articulation (state vs. communal) and economic articulation (which divides the territory between conservable and exploitable vs. integration of economic activities on a continuum of human use and enjoyment and conservation throughout the territory). This is a model of rationality that De Certeau [64] defined as scientific sense: the knowledge of the environment that expresses dissociation between a contemplative knowledge applicable to the protected reserve area and a model of strategic rationality that is projected in the exploitable zone vs. a reproductive rationality [65] in which reproduction of community life is linked to the sustainability of the natural world.

6. Conclusions

First, we believe that current governance in the area under consideration does not integrate the environmental and social dimensions and respect for the cultural identity of local communities. Although the designs of public governance carried out thus far have mentioned the need to articulate these three dimensions in economic, industrial and social development policies, these dimensions of development, the fruits of a modernising strategy, prevail over ecological preservation, increased levels of equality and freedom for local communities and self-determination of their way of life.

Second, and in view of the above, the dimensions of ecological, social and intercultural sustainability and justice, which, in some ways, are rhetorically present in public policies, cannot be considered separately, since they are interdependent. The systematic nature of the dimensions that integrate intercultural socioenvironmental justice demands that the three levels, owing to their mutual co-dependency, be integrated into the public policies of the 2030 Agenda and applied in governance policies. Socially balanced development that respects nature and the plurality of humanity must be a consequence of the integration of the levels of justice and sustainability and is not compatible with a development strategy that takes precedence over these levels or disarticulates them.

Third, a comparative examination of the degree of justice and sustainability between the two strategies considered here, the modernising public–private social development strategy with a predominance of instrumental rationality and the community development strategy that assumes a reproductive rationality [65], shows not only the differences noted above but also the greater capacity of the latter strategy to combine human development, equity and sustainability in an integrative manner. In this sense, this strategy is relevant and pertinent in promoting the objectives of the 2030 Agenda, particularly goals 2, 10 and 14. One of the best elements of Barú, as in other islands of the Greater Caribbean, is that the character of the collective is not mere rhetoric, nor is it reduced to a proclamation of the customary rights of Law 70 of 1993. In fact, Barú, both in the period of slavery and in the early days of abolitionist measures, was a unique example of community organisation and collective access to land and sea. Thus, this island is a case of enormous importance to show the impacts of modernising policies in the Caribbean and the current treatment of Afro-descendant populations by public policies for sustainable development.

Fourth, the Colombian government, within the framework of the 2030 Agenda, recognises that the increased pressures on ecosystems—which have diminished their functionality and supply of ecosystem services—also expose limitations in the generation of knowledge and research on oceanic issues [13]. This raises the challenge, according to the government, of articulating different disciplines to generate knowledge that supports decision-making and achieves greater socioenvironmental justice. However, the intercultural dimension of justice is not operative, since the government has not considered that, to generate better interventions from the public sector, this same generation of knowledge must include local communities: the people who know the sea and who have carried changes in their environments and their ways of life in their memory and in their local ecological knowledge. This intercultural barrier of not validating the knowledge of fishermen and not considering them valid subjects in a scientific conversation about the SDG targets is one of the great obstacles to sustainability.

Fifth, in this sense, we reaffirm the complex and integrated consideration of a public policy perspective that necessarily integrates intercultural socioenvironmental justice to treat traditional communities with equity and to recognise and position them as necessary actors in the struggle for sustainable human development, which integrates diversity and human wealth. Thus, research such as this study can have a practical impact on the community. Part of the reflective exercises led by the community authorities (community council) is to collaborate with fishermen in demonstrating how their way of life is reconfigured, and the community authorities are accompanied and complemented by academics with new approaches and instruments that become strategies for advocacy within and outside the collective.