Author(s): Johana Herrera Arango; Juan Antonio Senent De Frutos

Linked Author(s): Johana Herrera Arango

Keywords: Sustainability; Sea regulation; Caribbean; Maritories (maritime territory)

Abstract: In the Colombian Caribbean, the shaping of the landscape and the history of use of the large river basins have created human communities with a close connection to water. Experts call it amphibious cultures to show that this is a complex and adaptive way of life to water regimes (Ricaurte et al, 2019). However, little has been explored of coastal lifeways, of those populations that inhabit lagoons of the Caribbean coast and that circulate offshore for fishing and navigation. These coastal and marine populations, mostly Afro-descendant peoples, have developed a model of use and socio-ecological relations with the ocean, with the Greater Caribbean, which show a maritories (maritime territory) that connects Colombia with Insular America (Márquez 2019). This paper wants to emphasize the complex social and environmental realities faced by the coastal peoples of a fraction of the Colombian Caribbean, in Cartagena, which have been rapidly transformed by the tourism, port and hydrocarbon transport industry. These populations belong to ethnic groups and have not had sufficient state recognition to participate in the regulatory decisions that link the coasts and the sea to models of privatization or statization. All this, with the aggravating factor that many of the models analyzed in the northern coast of Colombia are presented as sustainable models, but in practice degrade natural systems and violate the rights of local communities. Theoretically, these analyzed cases show the transition from coasts and the sea as a common good of local communities, to a mixture of private or state-controlled goods that are inserted in coastal management models that are presented as sustainable and inclusive models (Said et al. 2019). Therefore, based on data on the degradation of natural and social systems in the region, the notion of sustainability that underlies national maritime management policies and that accentuates regulation patterns on the sea tending to scenarios of exclusion of artisanal fishing communities is problematized. An already complex context that is exacerbated by the negative impacts of climate variability, with the devastating effects of commercial-industrial fishing and ocean pollution (Douglassa & Cooperc 2019). However, from the fieldwork elaborated in 2020 and 2021 by the authors, it will be shown that fishermen, as good connoisseurs of adversities, generally rethink their practices and adapt to gradual or abrupt changes in ecosystems (sea-level rise, frequency and intensity of severe weather events), to the extent that their bond with the sea goes beyond the trade, the economic activity. For fishermen, fishing is an identity practice that requires the sea for its survival. (the cited references are not written so as not to exceed the number of words)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3850/IAHR-39WC2521711920221824

Year: 2022