Climate eco-governmentality: Contested knowledge and the production of climate change geographies in Colombian mangrove ecosystem

Abstract

Local knowledge plays a central yet uneven role in climate change policymaking. Drawing on the concept of climate eco-governmentality, this paper examines how interactions among actors, knowledge, and scales shape the governance of mangrove ecosystems in the Colombian Caribbean. Building on critical climate change and political ecology scholarship, I analyse how knowledge produced by local communities, public institutions, and academic actor's gives rise to climate change geographies marked by collaboration, conflict, frictions, and scalar encounters and mismatches. Based on empirical research in Cispatá Bay and the La Virgen and Juan Polo Marsh, the paper shows that locally grounded forms of knowledge—emerging from long-standing territorial defence, racialized histories of dispossession, and everyday care ecosystem practices—have challenged state-led conservation frameworks and reshaped national understandings of mangroves. This entangled and uneven history reveals how public policies in Colombia have been reconfigured through multi-scalar encounters, shifting from viewing mangroves as controllable natural resources to recognising them as socio-ecological systems situated at the centre of climate governance and territorial defence debates.