Collective titling and decentralized governance : the case of Black communities in the Colombian Pacific Region

Colombia launched for the first time a decentralization process on behalf of Black communities by granting them collective property rights over the land that they had inhabited for centuries. Black communities are organized into Community Councils, vested with the legal authority to design, implement, and enforce rules to govern natural resources within their collective territories. The process was a major political victory for this group, given its history of marginalization. To date few studies have examined how Community Councils have positioned themselves in the environmental governance system in Colombia. I address this gap by exploring how the institutional context and the capacity for action of COCOMACIA (the largest Community Council in the country) around the governance of inland fisheries changed with the decentralization process, a process embedded in power relations. Overall, despite major changes triggered by the collective title, this Community Council seems to have a limited capacity for action due to financial constraints, limited participation in decision-making at the regional level, and the lack of effective accountability mechanisms. The policy that decentralized environmental governance in Colombia failed to account for the ecosystem features of the territories, overlooking the need of coordinated institutional arrangements from different stakeholders for its governance. This study contributes to the knowledge on inland fisheries’ governance and shows how notions of institutional analysis and governance provide a way of explicitly exploring power dynamics. Finally, it stresses the need of unpacking the notion of decentralization in the literature.