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Objective/Context: This article explains how the Sierra de La Macarena Biological Reserve, which marked the beginning of the new state responsibility of caring for nature in Colombia, was conceived and then created by law in 1948. Additionally, this paper reconstructs the first decade of its existence. Methodology: This research is based on archival documents, historic publications and secondary sources, which allow us to understand the ideas about nature that guided such history and the concrete processes that characterized it. Originality: This article studies the process of State formation from a territorial and environmental perspective, bringing together political and environmental history, and pointing at new avenues of inquiry in both fields. Conclusions: The beginnings of a new state responsibility of caring for nature depended on previous developments of the state itself, particularly on the efforts to deal with tropical diseases. Therefore, an area of state activity devoted to insure the well-being of the population served as the basis for the inceptive development of another. This issue was, however, not entirely national. Global scientific networks, including medical doctors, entomologists and geologists, together with an innovative technology, aviation, also played a crucial role. The research station that was conceived along with the reserve to support long-term research was partly impaired by La Violencia of the 1950s. Instead, scientists carried out several expeditions that contributed to turn La Macarena into national patrimony, at least in the minds of some Colombians. Given that aspirations well exceeded the achievements, the definitive emergence of this area of state performance had to wait a few years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the government policies related to waterways and water use in Colombia. The author comments on the role of the government in developing environmental protection policy and examines the environmental responsibility of institutions. The impact of everyday water usage on resource management is also explored.

Modern society has been saturated by countless environmental conflicts that cause a flagrant violation of human rights. This article focuses on Interinstitutional Environmental Agendas as an appropriate instrument for the resolution of such conflicts through the construction of agreements between the stakeholders involved. Based on theoretical considerations and analysis of the implementation of an interinstitutional environmental agenda in an area of paramo located in the township of Soacha (Cundinamarca), the purpose is to provide methodological and conceptual elements and propose steps that should be considered for the implementation and execution of this instrument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2002, the Colombian Ministry of the Environment elaborated the National Strategic Plan for Green Markets to consolidate the production of environmental goods and services and take advantage of what the country's biodiversity has to offer. The PENMV was not implemented accurately in the province of Amazonas, due to the inexistence of a model to define how the province, the institutions involved in the topic and the citizen participation should be articulated. When a review of the governmental plans implemented at different points in time in the Amazon province is undertaken, no informationation can be found; thus evidencing the inexistence of that articulation. What it is presented are the main initiatives in the sustainable management of biodiversity developed by some local actors under actions implemented by national institutions such as the SINCHI Institute and Corpoamazonia that are supported in the framework of the plans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three moments of the Bogota's air quality policies (1974-2007) are examined, from the constructivist perspective and of the critical analysis of the discourse, with the purpose of reveal the paradigms that sustain these decisions as well as the influence of the social actors, in the context of an globalized and neoliberal world. The precarious comprehension of the problems prints on the policies ones a stamp of ineffectiveness that overcomes widely the expectations that suggest his texts but it allows that the tecno-bureaucracy should justify the fulfillment of his obligations without one manages to transform, or reverse, the undesirable situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental management in cities, especially related with air, water and soil poses important challenges to a society; Colombia's current economic development model, following unsustainable production and consumption patterns, causes pollution with very high costs for societies, related to health problems and deterioration of natural renewable resources. Public policies related to environmental management must focus on prevention and must follow principles like the producer's extended responsibility, in the frame of the life cycle of the product. This represents a co-responsibility of institutional stakeholders as well as that of citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Colombia, there have been two important reformist periods with regard to environmental public policies (1973-1976 and 1990-1993). In each case, after a certain degree of consolidation, they both entered into decline. This article describes and attempts to explain these processes. Ultimately, the Colombian case demonstrates the enormous difficulties of greening the State, a finding common in developing countries. Additionally, the article shows how each reform was accompanied by a new vision of the relationship between society and the environment. This vision, along with its corresponding policies, however, frequently entered into conflict with processes of economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental policies in Colombia's national parks tend to generate local conflicts and contradictory outcomes. This article describes the history and development of these policies, and criticizes their effects, in the case of the Islas del Rosario, a group of islands off of Colombia's Caribbean coast whose surrounding marine area was declared a national park in 1977. The article focuses on the main efforts to generate environmental governance over the marine, coastal, and terrestrial ecosystems and the effects of this management model on the Afro-Colombian community that inhabits Orika. It also analyses the political and environmental empowerment of this community, following its organization as part of participatory processes, and how it ended up becoming a political and ethnic actor that proposed a different model of governance in the protected area. Finally, the article discusses the difficulties that environmental policy faces when scientific knowledge is privileged over reality, local culture, and traditional knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editors discuss various articles within the issue such as environmental policies in Colombia, ecology and urban sprawl.

Using protected areas to conserve nature has, in recent decades, acquired significant importance in the international policymaking arena. Despite a solid legal base, protected areas in Colombia face various obstacles. The divergent narratives between the natural and social sciences underline these challenges: i) defining the object of conservation in terms of exclusion through positive scientific analysis; ii) the concept of the natural in opposition to the cultural; iii) an emphasis on the object of conservation that can sometimes cause the stakeholders involved to become invisible; iv) that the conservation of nature has limited legitimacy since it is perceived to be the historical product of conquest and frontier expansion; v) the emergence of conflicts between human rights and collective environmental rights, vi) the socio-environmental perspective of conservation in which the devolution of land rights to local communities and the conservation of nature are sometimes confused as a decision that benefits the larger society. Nature conservation could be pursued through the integration, at a national scale, of a protected nature which arises as a legitimate social decision, and in a multi-cultural perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses how different groups valued the natural resources in the region of the San Jorge River over the course of the twentieth century. Some people saw them as pantry of natural resources for the taking while other warned of their over-exploitation. In the case of fishing, resource conflicts date back to at least the eighteenth century. The role of the state in this work is seen as a historic, characterized by its desire to foment economic development without taking the past into account and, even less, without trying to establish what might happen in the future. This has led to the current crisis of alarming proportions in the region's fisheries as well as a decline in the living conditions of local residents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 70's different entities of the public administration have outlined interventions on the natural space compound Reserva Forestal Protectora Bosque Oriental de Bogotá, with the intention of preserving it from the alterations that leave being historically object. However all these interventions were fruitless because they never integrate the urban vision of this environmental problem. The new policies proposals reproduce this tendency, taking uncontrollably to the failure of the policy and to perpetuate the tendencies of the real estate market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an ex-ante evaluation of a set of public policies in the areas of conservation and security in the Chingaza National Park of Colombia. To evaluate those policies, which could be implemented jointly or individually, a Contjoint Analysis was used. The gains in welfare that would result from the individual or form the joint implementation of different combinations of policies were measured. It was found that the benefits of the joint implementation of conservation and sequirity policies were larger than the sum of the benefits that would be obtained if they were implemented separatedly. In addition, it was found that while conservation policies alone would not be cost-efective, security policies would be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]