Ethnic Land Rights as a Faustian Bargain? On the Afro-Colombian Struggle for Alternative Livelihoods and Its Limits

Caroline Cornier
Additional contact information
Caroline Cornier: Caroline Cornier is the corresponding author (caroline.cornier@manchester.ac.uk) and is affiliated with the University of Manchester, Manchester, UK.

Progress in Development Studies, 2026, vol. 26, issue 1, 7-26

Abstract: From the 1990s onwards, ethnic minorities in Latin America have been granted collective property rights to protect their natural livelihoods and culture from extractivism and armed conflict. In the Colombian case, this legal innovation was largely the product of Afro-Colombian communities’ activism around cultural identities whose legal outcomes have been celebrated in post-development literature as evidence for subaltern groups regained self-determination and emancipation from unsustainable extractivist development models and violence. While other authors have since pointed to collective land rights’ essentializing tendencies and actual limitations in challenging extractive capitalism, including the Colombian drug economy, less attention has been given to what explains their limited outcomes in securing alternative livelihoods. Drawing on evidence from two Afro-Colombian communities, this article argues that ethnic land rights tend to disregard the communities’ own material entanglement with extractivist capitalism and that this complicates the search for effective ways of securing ethnic communities’ livelihoods.

Keywords: Ethnic Land Rights; Collective Property Rights; Political Settlement Analysis (PSA); Extractivism; Afro-Colombian Communities; Colombia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14649934261426727 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:prodev:v:26:y:2026:i:1:p:7-26

DOI: 10.1177/14649934261426727

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Progress in Development Studies
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().