Gender, coca, and the Colombian Peace Agreement: The overlooked gendered dynamics in policy implementation

Established in 2016, the Colombian Peace Agreement aimed to resolve longstanding conflict in the country. One of its commitments was to address the ‘War on Drugs’ including through gender-based approaches. The Agreement includes provisions aimed at supporting those cultivating coca, such as an enrolment process in a coca substitution program aimed at supporting the economic livelihoods of coca growers. In this article, we examine why women coca growers may be overlooked in this process and what assumptions key stakeholders in charge of implementing the Agreement make about gender and coca growing. We contrast such assumptions with the lived experiences of women coca growers to demonstrate how data collection practices in policy and research constitute a version of the coca economy predominantly ignorant to women’s priorities and concerns. Using Fraser’s (2020) framework on ontopolitically-oriented research and Bacchi’s (2009) What’s the Problem Represented to Be Approach, we illustrate how stakeholder assumptions about women’s roles in the coca growing economy shape the legitimate recipients and beneficiaries of drug policy interventions. Our analysis offers novel insights into how gendered dynamics become concealed through drug policies designed for coca growing contexts, as well as explain the scarcity of research focused on women and coca-growing. We argue that the enrolment process in the coca substitution program has undermined women’s economic autonomy through their exclusion as domestic counterparts, while their security concerns have been treated as unrelated to coca substitution programs.