State practice in broader institutional context

In this final section, I draw together an analysis of state practice that seeks to show how risk and vulnerability are produced, as Gupta argues, in the friction between the agendas, bureaus, levels and spaces that make up the state, but also in the ways in which these formal institutions of the state are embedded in local institutions. As in Gupta, I therefore shift the focus from the intentional practices of risk management to the unintentional practices that create new contradictions and tensions at the heart of the programme. These, I argue, complicate the drive to reduce exposure to risk which, when combined with an absence of measures to address sensitivity to risk, create new distributions and forms of vulnerability.

The disjunct between the multiple agencies involved in the programme, and their different mandates, affected the provision of infrastructure in risk zones. The lag in providing drainage to the barrios of Altos de Estancia and Caracoli, for example, was

121 attributable to the inaction of the Aqueducto – or state water company. As mentioned in relation to the ongoing occurrence of disasters in the barrio of Caracoli, while risk focussed agencies are mandated with protecting the right to life, the (public run) water company is mandated to protect constitutional rights to water – but not drainage. This contradiction was said by numerous district officials to be the cause of recurrent landslides in the zone.

The complications in reducing exposure through both resettlement and eviction illustrate how risk management agencies were enmeshed in a broader institutional politics that drew in state agencies, quasi-state agencies, private companies and local institutions. Firstly, a complex politics of land claims both facilitated and restricted people’s access to risk zones for land for housing. An interview in the local district office revealed how active local mafias still were in selling land in risk zones. A Caja official and a new beneficiary to the programme showed me a photo of a lot that had been cleared by the district in Caracoli the day before, and the house demolished. On the ruins of a wall, a sign had already been painted ‘a vende’, for sale. The woman described how she was offered a lot and told she should buy it ‘before the DPAE comes to assess it’ (field visit with Caja de Vivienda officials – June 2010). The

‘mafia de los lotes’ (plots mafia), as one informant described them, still purportedly sell lots with ‘rights to resettlement’. In an indirect politics of entitlement, mafias continuously appropriated the source of state entitlements, benefiting from zone clearance. Their role in relation to formal state agencies remained obscure; they remained unmentioned in any documents relating to the programme, and undoubtedly operated with the blessing of local paramilitary and vigilante groups, active in all the risk zones, who undertook security operations with the local police.

In turn, the enmeshment of local mayors in this politics (despite them being political appointees of the city mayor) often prevented them from exercising their formally mandated role to evict people, as one informant explained “if they pull down houses, they may get death threats” (Disaster Risk Consultant, Ministry of Environment – January 2010).

The other major players with claims to land were the owners who had publicly registered title to the land, some of whom had sub-divided and sold the land themselves whereas others had the land appropriated by the piratas for that purpose.

The ability of state agencies to obtain the land from them affected the extent to

122 which they could claim public ownership of the land and turn it into public parks – in Nueva Esperanza, for example, state agencies had been able to rent the land off the original owner, but it had been more difficult to locate and negotiate with owners in Altos de Estancia. In other cases, however, land owners could be directly involved in collaborating with state officials to evict inhabitants, as was the case for a particular community of inhabitants in the Brisas de Volador risk zone, who were resisting state efforts to evict them, allegedly because the owner had returned to reclaim his rights to land.

In addition, whereas risk management agencies wished to remove all services to high risk zones once resettlement projects were complete, thereby making the zones less attractive for settlement, this practice was constrained by the actions of service companies, with whom there was no legal framework for such a practice. Instead, electricity companies continued to provide services, in lieu of the illegal tapping of electricity. Secondly, as the water supply could not be taken away as a matter of right, communal tubes were left in place in high risk zones by the state authorities, which remaining households could then connect to.

The final dimension I raise here is the way state agencies organise themselves around competing rights agendas (touched on in the case of water provision).

Whereas risk management agencies were concerned to uphold the right to life, state human rights and civil protection agencies (the key port of call for inhabitants seeking support to bring legal cases against risk management agencies either for eviction or the failure to evict) supported broader constitutional rights to livelihoods and quality of life. In some cases, human rights agencies asked that newly displaced settlers in the zones be allowed to remain on humanitarian grounds rather than being evicted (as happened for one group in Altos de Estancia, see DPAE 2009).

These at times contradictory dynamics – in which institutions both inside, outside and with non-formalised links into the broader state apparatus complicate and facilitate the movement of people in and out of risk zones and with it both complicate and facilitate the project of clearing and bounding risk zones – add to the ways in which governance ‘on the ground’ can become ad hoc and arbitrary, but can also lead to greater exposure for people who are formally unprotected, living as they do under threat of eviction.

123 5.5 Conclusion

This chapter shows how, firstly, in stark contrast to impacts-based models for assessing risks, which privilege and fix ‘hazard’ as risk, risk assessments embody particular assumptions, rooted in politics, history and culture. This influences the process by which risks manifest themselves in physical events. Secondly, with reference to existing frameworks for understanding risk as vulnerability, the chapter shows how vulnerability is also shaped and re-shaped through the production of knowledge about risk, and the ways in which this influences and is influenced by the practices of state institutions. In the informal urban context, I stress how this embodies politicised assumptions about how formalisation is to take place and for whom. A process of co-production occurs in which ideas emanating from the state about what it means to be at risk come to be inscribed onto new forms of urban citizenship, at the same time that ideas about what it is to have ‘legitimate’ claim to citizenship come to define who is at risk. I echo Foucauldian scholars in drawing attention to the everyday practices of the state through which the ‘natural’ is, effectively, co-produced, with the chapter showing how these practices may, in the face of the flux and social complexity of urban informal life, be both flexible and discretionary in nature. However, not only does the chapter draw attention to the inner workings of the expertise driving these practises, but in the final part, it extends this view by showing how state practice also emerges out of institutional multiplicity, both within and without the state. The following chapter explores how societal actors respond to risk assessment and the meanings and values it embodies, on the basis of their own meanings and values.

124

Chapter 6

‘But we are not illegal’: Responses to Landslide Risk in Three Informal Settlements of Bogota, Colombia

6.1 Introduction

Chapter 5 set out the state politics of risk. This chapter is the first of two empirical chapters that now examine how people themselves determine and respond to environmental risk and risk assessments in informal urban settlements. It aims to shed light, first, on the ‘what’ of urban adaptation, asking what risks people are responding and adapting to, and how these reflect changes to their livelihoods as much as the fact of physical events themselves. Second, it aims to extend livelihoods-based vulnerability analysis by accounting for the role of socially-embedded meanings and identities in people’s responses to risk. Third, it sets out to analyse how people’s responses to risk are shaped by the institutional relationship between state and citizen, and relationships of trust and inter-dependence with institutions. New to the context of urban vulnerability theory, it draws on ideas discussed in Chapter 3 to show how peoples’ responses to risk are framed by the values and meanings embedded – indeed co-produced – in risk assessments (echoing Jasanoff and Wynne 1998; Wynne 1996; Birkenholtz 2008 in their discussions of public responses to formal expertise). Furthering accounts of societal responses to risk assessment discussed in Chapter 3, however, the chapter highlights how such responses vary across the social groupings found in informal, urban communities and shows how agency is shaped by convergence, resistance and ambivalence; state framings and local idioms of identity and meaning.

This chapter is based on the fieldwork conducted in three landslide risk zones in informal settlements of Bogota, Colombia (Caracoli, Brisas de Volador and Altos de Estancia). It uses oral histories and other interview material drawn from different types of household across the three zones. It is also informed by analysis of secondary documents relating to risk management in the zones (such as transcripts of court cases brought by inhabitants). In the informal, urban context, the chapter highlights how people’s experience of risk is framed by their own concerns around housing, shelter, access to services and security; their own understandings of their status and rights as urban citizens, and the possibilities opened up and closed off for

125 them in the arenas of risk management and housing policy (more influential than their ability to engage in short-term coping actions, which most residents recognised as extremely limited in effectiveness).

The chapter is structured in five sections. The first section gives an overview of how the knowledge produced through state-based risk assessments (discussed in the last chapter) relates to the views expressed across the three risk zones. The second section examines in more depth how people respond to risk in the context of the meanings, values and aspirations attached to their livelihoods and the broader sets of risks to livelihoods that they experience. The third section examines responses to risk assessment in the context of local understandings of legality and formality. The fourth section analyses how state practice affects attitudes to risk assessment, and how these practices run, in some cases, counter to people’s lived experience of landslide events and impacts. The final section sets out how contests around causation and responsibility mark attitudes to risk. The approach of the chapter is not to suggest that people’s attitudes to risk should be romanticised or reified vs state-based expertise, but to explore how particular approaches to risk might account for these local dynamics.

6.2 Convergence and contrasts in state and local responses to landslide risk The following table presents the ways in which the knowledge generated through state-based risk assessment related to views and attitudes expressed across the three risk zones. As the table shows, there was both divergence and convergence between residents’ views and the knowledge communicated from risk assessments. In addition, at certain moments, state risk assessments did influence the attitudes of residents (i.e. the state perspective was ‘absorbed’), but the reverse effect was less common - as highlighted in the last chapter, the state was mostly closed to incorporating societal perspectives. The rest of the chapter explains and develops the points made in this table.

126 Table 2: Characterisation of state and local responses to landslide risk

Areas of divergence Areas of convergence Areas of absorption

State

6.3 Finding a home in the city: Risk and the meaning of livelihood

This section shows how responses to risk are embedded in the broader project of building a livelihood and the risks to those livelihoods. I break down the section according to a basic typology of different groups – present across all of the high risk zones – who exhibit different livelihoods ‘styles and pathways’, a terminology adopted by de Haan and Zoomers to move away from the strategic individualism implied in the more commonly used notion of livelihoods ‘strategies’ (de Haan and Zoomers 2005). Instead, one finds social groupings with ‘styles’ based, in this context, on ownership history and status (owners or renters/squatters) but also, critically, political status, both in relation to the inclusion or exclusion criteria for resettlement, but also other forms of political categorisation. These groups – owners, the recently displaced (desplazados, or those who have migrated from rural conflict zones) and those who rent or squat in the zones – respond to risk management with distinct purposes related primarily to either claiming, defending, transforming or receiving housing assets, not only for their material value but also for their meaning (see Bebbington 1999) for these distinctions and discussion of the importance of the

127 material and non-material dimensions of asset holding). Whether these aims bring them into conflict or co-operation with risk management agencies depends both on their status within the programme but also how their livelihoods aspirations fit with the livelihoods transformation envisaged by the state through its resettlement programme.

a. Home owners

The majority of people I encountered in all the high risk zones were home owners (albeit through illegal purchase, a fact I discuss further in Section 2.). Many could be called ‘long-term settlers’, in that they arrived as part of the main wave of urbanisation of the zones from the 1990s. Theirs is the project that James Holston has described as ‘auto-construction’, or the gradual and lengthy process of self-building, through which people would fulfil their greatest life-time project, building a house to live in (Holston 1991). For those that had arrived in the 1990s, this personal project was often accompanied by collective efforts to found a barrio, firstly, through the attainment of services and, secondly, through inclusion in legalisation programmes (which in turn secured further rights to public services).

Among the groups of home owners in high risk zones were both those who were technically eligible to be resettled but faced difficulties completing the administrative hurdles for access, those who refused to leave despite being eligible and those who were petitioning for eligibility. A further group I was able to interview were home owners who were eligible, but had rejected the housing option offered by the state and forged their own collective solution. The common theme underlying all of these actions was the search to complete the project of owning a home in the city. What I stress in this section is how these aspirations converged and diverged with the new form of livelihood offered by the state as the solution to risk, how interpretations of risk assessment were embedded in these livelihoods aspirations, and how this modifies the ‘social landscape’ of risk, or the actual patterns of who continues to inhabit high risk zones.

There is a strong sense of a shared language between the aspirations of most, if not practically all, owners and the stated aims of the state project, to improve conditions for the city’s poorest inhabitants. As Maria⁶⁸, a 36 year old former inhabitant of

68 All names have been changed.

128 Altos de Estancia who left the countryside with her family due to economic hardship, recalled, the DPAE and the Caja de Vivienda “told us that they were going to give us a better house, a better life, that we would have better opportunities for our children” (Interview 11.02.2010). A family of sisters and their children that I interviewed in Brisas de Volador described how they wished to move, not only because of the conditions in which they were living, and the shame they felt at living in their house, but because they were glad of the opportunity to move to a house that would have public services and to bring their children up in a different area (Interview 17.01.2010). Their neighbours, petitioning for resettlement from the

‘medium risk’ zone, described how they were interested in participating in the resettlement programme as they feared for their lives and sought a ‘vida digna’

[dignified life] (Interview 12.03.2010).

Given the opportunity, many people had left the zones through the resettlement programme, even when they did not feel at any personal risk from landslides, or only experienced minor effects. Accessing the programme as a means to transform one’s livelihood had also become an important activity for many owners who had not been evacuated, especially given that once they were included in a high risk zone they were no longer permitted to modify their houses, and their desire to finish house building in situ was curtailed⁶⁹. In ‘Phase Two’ of Altos de Estancia, the area undergoing resettlement, some inhabitants described how the biggest implication of being in a high risk zone was not necessarily the risks that they faced, but the fact that they hadn’t been able to carry on building their houses (interviews 27.06.2010)⁷⁰. High risk zones were also no longer eligible for public service improvements. In Brisas, inhabitants described how they felt they could not leave (because they were not eligible for resettlement and because to abandon one’s house was also to abandon one’s investment in it, see below) but they couldn’t better their situation in the zone. As one woman, a mother who shared her house with her two sisters, all of whom were struggling to make the payments necessary to be included

69 This ‘conditional use’ or restriction on house building also applied in Phase 3 of Altos de Estancia, technically a ‘medium risk’ zone, where residents (who were not included in resettlement) reported thinking of selling their houses as a result. One inhabitant complained that being in a risk zone also prevented them asking for a loan to make house improvements (21.08.2010).

70 In addition, inhabitants reported wanting to leave the zone due to the impacts of resettlement itself, which meant houses were often left isolated as people lost their neighbours, and the zone felt more insecure. Many parents also hoped that by moving they would be able to live in an area that was more secure in general for the sake of their children.

129 in the resettlement programme, expressed, “they [the state institutions] neither help nor allow us to improve ourselves” (interview 17.01.2010).

As Biehl and Petryana discuss in their analysis of citizenship formation based on bio-medical ‘regimes’ (Biehl 2005; Petryna 2005), this opportunity to remake or move forward with one’s livelihood is rooted in scientific process. This engendered a dependence on the state as people depended on the DPAE to give them their

‘official’ risk status for inclusion, whatever their own experience of risk. This is in stark contrast to the autonomous manner in which people constructed their own

‘official’ risk status for inclusion, whatever their own experience of risk. This is in stark contrast to the autonomous manner in which people constructed their own