2025/10/02 by Alejandro Ponce de León · 2 voices
Social Sciences · #History and Politics in Latin America #Water Governance and Infrastructure
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/25729861.2025.2513196
openalex publication_date 2025/10/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/15
This article examines the early emergence of volume-based modes of water governance in southwestern Colombia. Rooted in hydrological science, volume and flow became central to the state’s efforts to render waterbodies legible to legal, technical, and infrastructural intervention. In the context of economic modernization, rivers and wetlands were no longer encountered as bounded natural features, but as volumes of water that could be inscribed on charts, governed through levees and norms, and allocated across competing users. Drawing on technical reports and government archives, I trace how volumetric reasoning afforded new relations between riverine ecologies and state actors and articulated new forms of jurisdiction. As engineers and legal officials grappled with the changing volumes of waterbodies, I show that state capacities were co-produced through a gathering of emergent knowledge practices, material devices, and juridical forms – an assemblage that sedimented, paradoxically, around the abstraction of water in motion.