IDPs in Columbia. Photo by WFP.

On a recent visit to Bogotá, Colombia, I witnessed how immense this city has become. Since 1950, Bogotá has grown from 700,000 inhabitants to approximately 8.5 million (estimate is inclusive of municipalities on the city’s periphery). Looking west from a friend’s terrace in the old colonial district of La Candelaria, I could see the city spreading across the vast Bogotá Savannah – a high plateau that rises to an average of 8500 feet above sea level in the Colombian Andes. However, this seemingly picturesque image conceals a starker picture of the forces driving the city’s rapid population growth and harsh living conditions in slums like Soacha on the southern outskirts of the city.

Over the past fifty years, Bogotá has experienced accelerated growth of rural-to-urban immigration as a result of economic change and decades of civil violence in Colombia. Moreover, Bogotá has absorbed an ever increasing amount of Colombia’s internally displaced population. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that in 2009 there were over 3 million internally displaced people (IDP’s) in Colombia, which is the second highest IDP population in the world after Sudan. More problematically, investigations by UNHCR indicate that while security in Colombia has improved at the national level, the number of IDP’s registered per year increased to over 300,000 in 2007 and 2008. Estimates jointly provided by the Bogotá-based Consultancy on Human Rights and Displacement and the Archdiocese of Bogotá indicate that the number of internally displaced people, including those displaced by crop fumigations, is substantially higher at over 4 million.

Tanja Wol Sorensen, a Danish national working for the International Peace Observatory in Bogotá, agrees that IDP numbers in Colombia are underreported. In my interview with her, Sorensen stated, “There is a government agency in charge of registering IDP’s (Sistemo Unico de Registro), but many IDP’s are scared to register because they fear that the government and entities perceived to be supported by the government, such as the palm oil industry and paramilitary groups, have a hand in the displacements.” Sorensen added, “Many IDP’s are subsistence farmers whose families have inhabited these lands for generations.”

According to UNHCR, as much as sixty percent of all IDP’s come from areas along the Pacific coast that are home to indigenous and Afro-Colombian populations. In 2009, the Constitutional Court of Colombia ruled that “a policy focusing on the special needs of the displaced Afro-Colombians is missing” and that the “Colombian State has gravely ignored its constitutional duties” with regard to the indigenous populations. In 2006, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights wrote that Afro-Colombians in particular have “been the victims of extra-judicial executions, assassinations, threats, illegal arrests and sexual violence, actions attributed to illegal armed groups and, on occasion, to members of the Public Forces.”

The issue of internal displacement in Colombia represents a startling human rights problem. Given its magnitude, the level of international media attention to the situation seems to be particularly lacking. Moreover, along with the loss of rights to ancestral lands, this dilemma presents a rapid and significant loss of cultural knowledge. Indigenous and Afro-Colombian populations are likely to possess special knowledge pertaining to plant life and subsistence farming practices. In particular, I am interested in how certain indigenous and Afro-Colombian populations may have built community institutions that exhibit elements of self-governed, enduring common-pool resources (CPR’s). According to Elinor Ostrom, CPR’s are characterized by rivalry and non-excludability. This means that once a resource is extracted by one community member, it cannot be enjoyed by another member, and it is difficult to exclude potential appropriators from enjoying the resource. Well-monitored and well-governed common-pool resources tend to be found at the local level and appear to enjoy a certain amount of autonomy from state interventions. Over the past two centuries, indigenous Colombians and Afro-Colombians have often worked together to share and preserve common lands and resources. Observing and studying the institutions that they have devised would enrich our understanding of institutional design along with their specific cultures. In this way, their loss of rights and ancestral lands is a loss for all of us.

For more information on this topic or to learn more from the agencies and references that I have cited, please visit:

2010 UNHCR country operations profile, Colombia

International Displacement Monitoring Centre

International Peace Observatory