A quick explainer on my work in La Guajira
A digestible TLDR of what I've been up to
I love that writing offers me a long-form way to express my emotions alongside my intellectual musings. There’s contradictions in everything we do, and writing, to me, is one way to put them on the table without giving too much judgment to just one thing.
However, I also want people to feel that this is accessible. And for all the new people that have recently subscribed to my Substack, I wanted to write a short piece outlining what I was up to over the past year. So here we go.
Setting the stage for my POV: A Burning World
Our world is burning. We face the immediate threats of climate change, biodiversity loss, and air and water pollution. And for all the progress that we tell ourselves we’re making on ESG or becoming “sustainable”, most indicators are pointed in the wrong direction. We are burning more fossil fuels, overfishing our oceans, overgrazing our fields, overcutting our forests, and overthrowing our trash.
We justify “development” and progress by touting how global poverty has been reduced. And to some extent, that is true. But it’s not a settled science, and there’s equally interesting data1 showing that our measures of “poverty” and well-being, even when adjusted for inflation, have not drastically improved the lives of the Global South.
Things are bad. And I, like many, are sick of seeing LinkedIn ads for “social innovation” that never get to the root of the problem, for climate technology that just enables more consumerism, of “social justice” philanthropy that makes rich people feel less bad about their destructive lifestyles and careers.
There are many of us from the Global North that are disillusioned with promises of progress and development. You can call us researchers, learners, questioners, children, idealists. And if you ask us what we need to do, we say that we need to look to the pockets of hope. Of real hope.
That leads me to Colombia.
The Promise of La Guajira, Colombia
As I’ve established, climate change, among other environmental crises, is bad and it’s already affecting us. However, due to the drastic inequality between countries and the vulnerability of many countries’ to the climate risks of warming and unpredictable weather, the poorest countries in the world—historically known to be pillaged during colonialism and doubly taken advantage of during imperialism and subsequent international trade and finance architectures that prioritize rich countries’ financial coffers over poor countries’ economic well-being, the Global South, including much of South and SE Asia, Africa, and Latin America, will receive the brunt of the impacts of an increasingly unstable 21st century.
Enter Colombia. The second-most biodiverse country in the world behind Brazil, the historical homeland of thousands of Indigenous tribes, a landmass spanning from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean where Spanish colonization, American imperialism, state corruption, generational violence, and the “Resource Curse”2 have trapped many Colombians in continual poverty or the “middle-income" trap” that characterizes much of Latin America.
Within Colombia, some people have fared better than others. The landowning elite, for example, and the political class, populate the exhorbitant neighborhoods found in Bogota and Medellin, while those involved in the drug trade enjoy their homes in Barranquilla and Cali. However, for the peasant class dispossed of their land, the Afro-Colombian populations lacking security and state investment, and for the Indigenous peoples that have been systematically pursued for erasure and exploitation, their histories have been less rosy. They are pushed to the outskirts of city slums, fleeing cycles of violence and dispossession, and living precariously on poverty’s edge.
But things are changing. Today, Indigenous peoples are afforded rights and public policy provisions that respect their customs and land rights. In 2022, the country elected its first leftist president in modern history, promising that environmental progress, land rights for the poor, and reforms to health and the economy would improve the lives of millions.3
Desire for change is no more present than in La Guajira, Colombia, a province claiming the largest Indigenous population in Colombia, a history of political corruption, environmental hardship worsened by climate change, and an economy defined by the same colonial and imperialist forces that have carved out its coal and slurped its oil and gas with little respect for local people.
So why is there hope? The title of my Substack, “Winds of Change”, is a reference to the potential of La Guajira to become the epicenter of the Just Energy Transition. It’s suggesting that La Guajira’s abundant wind and solar, much of which is found on Indigenous Wayúu land, may open the doors for a new form of development. This development won’t be characterized by pillaging mountain-sides and polluting rivers for coal, all while displacing Wayuu. No, it’ll be using the free electrons of the sun and continual breezes of the easterly winds to generate electricity for the whole country.
We checked one of our boxes for promise—it’s green, and it partially answers the ecological burning world problem I presented above.
However, it also aims to benefit the Wayuu people in the form of economic compensations. In land that is increasingly arid, where child malnutrition is the highest in the country, where the Colombian government has arguably never paid attention to its people, the government and private energy companies are promising that Wayuu people will finally be compensated for their land.4
This takes me back to my goal as a researcher. I am disillusioned with the world that created the inequality of La Guajira. But if I look to futures that get us out of this mess, La Guajira is the poster child. What if we can use the power of renewables to improve the lives of the most vulnerable? What if we make the world economy less extractive and more generative? Is change possible? Can we save ourselves?
My Research Question
In short, my winding 10 months were spent asking the following questions:
Is the “just energy transition” to renewables actually happening? Are Wayuu people seeing their lives improve from the entrance of wind energy companies?
What policies are in place to make sure that this transition can happen in the best way? How should these three actors—the Colombian government, private companies, and Wayuu communities—come to the “table” to negotiate what’s best for everyone?
What I found
So, now it should be clear that
The world is burning and our current level of social and environmental inequality is unacceptable
La Guajira, Colombia is an example of a territory pillaged by colonial and imperialist forces taking their natural resources, but it also holds the keys to an environmental (renewable energy) and social (economic compensations to communities) future of prosperity
This energy transition is happening right now as we speak. Research seeks to capture a holistic picture of what’s going on, so that we can point our flashlights in the right direction when thinking about the future.
So what are the answers to my two questions?
No, a “just energy transition” is not happening
There are policies, but they are not being implemented in a way that is truly beneficial to communities.
A little more detail
My work took me to Wayuu fishing communities on the Caribbean coastline, hundreds of kilometers from urban centers; to tense conference halls, where community leaders clashed with company representatives and government officials; and to the university classrooms, where everyone was trying to figure out how to improve dialogue between these three actors.
Instead of going into the weeds of all the intricacies I learned, I’ll use the rest of this piece to send some key takeaways.
“The negotiating table is unequal, and they don’t understand each other.”
You can bring everyone together, including Indigenous leaders, but some sides will have much more technical knowledge (and thus leverage) than others. If a company knows how to make community compensations seem really large when in fact they are a small fraction of their profits, they will do that.
If the state doesn’t bring translators that can give community members the information they need to decide their priorities, then any decision will not be democratic.
If communities threaten companies with strikes, sabotage their infrastructure, and break the agreements they just made, then companies will not know how to pull off the project.
“Communities aren’t unified in how they feel.”
There’s no clear consensus within communities that all Wayuu people want to “accept” or “reject” the projects. There are disagreements. Some Wayuu want economic compensations. Others want to preserve the environmental and spiritual integrity of their land (ex. Can you put a price on the graveyard of your ancestors?). The Wayuu have always had methods of conflict mediation that have allowed them to sort through these internal disagreements. But these methods, worn away by cultural assimilation, Westernization, and above all else, the lucrative possibilities of economic compensation, have made such processes all the more difficult.
“There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, but a place-by-place solution won’t work either.”
Prior consultation, or the policy that the government must provide space for dialogue between companies and communities in order for them to agree on the parameters of the project, is not being implemented correctly. But even if it is, it’s an incredibly local process. One community may go through a months-long negotiation with a company before accepting a project, while another community may have territorial disputes with their neighbors that prevent them from coming into an agreement. If the company has to conduct 40 prior consultations with 40 communities, it is incredibly difficult to get everyone on the same page.
And finally, what I see as the overarching problem:
Wayuu communities have always adapted to changing conditions. They traded with the English, Dutch, and French in order to defeat Spaniard colonization. They hunted and gathered, then farmed until the climate became unwilling to give, and now they graze livestock for food. But at the center of their success as a people was solidarity. Families protected each other, provided for each other in times of need, and built trading systems that would be beneficial for everyone. Territory was collective, not private. But in a world that wants to parcel territories and sell them at a price point, where economic transactions are increasingly impersonal and tied to personal economic gain, where the climate gets more unforgiving and the population increases and things can seem dire, chaos may ensue. And the frontiers of capitalism, private development and individualism have reached La Guajira.
So what does this mean? Looking forward
It is not my job to provide easy solutions to intractable problems. Doing so as a foreigner who was only there for 10 months would be arrogant, if not dismissive of the complexity of La Guajira. But maybe I can tie some threads to get us to think about the bigger picture.
The prospects of a just energy transition should give us hope. It is possible, albeit difficult, to reduce emissions and serve the needs of societies. But if we are to pull it off, we need to think about history and trust. The energy transition, for all the talk about declining cost curves, is about trust. We need to rebuild trust in each other, and communities that have been screwed over must be given patience to think about what they really want out of a future.
People are going to have to make sacrifices. Sometimes what’s best for humanity or the planet is not best for a small group of people. But those people, especially if they are frontline communities, must be respected and heard.
If we let capital choose our futures for us, we’ll never win. Capital investment moves fast. It’s powerful. There are billions and trillions of dollars betting on technological and economic futures that the citizens of the world do not know or do not agree with. That is why we need to step up and fight for the right to participate. To be informed. To be at the table. And to know how to make use of said table.
It may be an Indigenous community in Colombia, an oil refinery community in Houston, a rural collective of wheat farmers in Iowa, or the mostly “upper-middle” higher-education-accessing class readership that reads my Substack. We all need to get involved, talk to each other, and think about what’s best for our neighbors and communities. This is not the time to escape. It’s the time to lock in into what matters—community and our precious planet.
With unsteady hands,
Rishab
I cite this data and explore these arguments in this piece:
The Resource Curse, or Poverty Paradox, refers to the finding that the countries with the highest levels of natural wealth (oil, water, landmass, agriculture, etc.) are often the poorest in terms of GDP. There’s multiple theories as to why, but one is clear—the lasting effects of colonialism and imperialism on shaping uneven economic development overly dependent on these resources.
Feel free to check out this post to look at the promises and failures of progressive politics in Colombia.
The eternal question of “What should economic development look like?” is partially addressed in these posts.
How is this a tldr…
I opened this and was transported back to your Ted Talk doing your thesis presentation where you showed your powers as an analyst and a communicator. I have a deep-seated belief (fallacy?) where I trust the power of rhetoric to change things. Your writing over the past year has continued to cement that regardless the challenges you meet out there, you are a superb communicator and I am always here to listen to your perspective. Just by perceiving things, they change (I took a physics class once). Through description like this, there is the possibility to transform.