Manufacturing ignorance or dealing with complexity? Adaptation politics and the making of river futures in Colombia

Abstract

Futures are not neutral. Imagining certain futures over others is deeply political and rooted in specific imaginaries. We address this issue by scrutinizing dominant future-making processes in riverine adaptation and elucidate power structures that shape such processes. We describe what future-making processes ground the implementation of adaptation projects, what knowledge strategies are used to (attempt to) ensure certain futures, and what knowledges are actively ignored and marginalized by dominant future-makers and adaptation implementers. To scrutinize dominance in futures and adaptation, we build upon power dynamics of truth regimes in river imaginaries and critiques of modernism in which we highlight how knowing, and not-knowing, are actively produced through manufactured ignorance. We build our understanding of manufactured ignorance by introducing the notion of Hirschman’s hiding hand principle which fundamentally suggests that failure to anticipate unintended consequences and unforeseen complexities is a good thing. We problematize this logic and describe the devastating and violent effects in a case study context of the Lower Magdalena River in Colombia, specifically in the Zapatosa wetland. Our findings suggest that the different futures and adaptation actions resonate with different imaginaries, namely a rooted-amphibian imaginary and an eco-modern imaginary. We suggest that manufactured ignorance, as a part of eco-modernism, leads to increased tensions in the case study area, produces deliberate claims of not-knowing and actively marginalizes those involved with alternative future-making practices. We conclude by arguing that the fundamental misrecognition of rooted imaginaries and related futures, rooted epistemic communities and adaptation practices face disproportionate epistemic and physical violence. This violence is legitimized by the opposing (eco)modernist imaginary through the normalization of manufactured ignorance.