Greening the land restoration question : Exploring tensions between gold mining and land restitution for black communities in Colombia

The so-called Master Narrative of Loss and Restoration applied in land restitution policies “place productive land at the center of peoples well-being” (Walker 2008:15) and defend the idea that by ‘giving the land back’ to the forcibly displaced populations larger problems of dispossession and marginalization may be solved. Experiences on land restitution, such as the South African, have demonstrated that land restoration is not a panacea for solving far larger rural problems (Walker 2008:227). This research aims to problematize the master narrative by studying, from a political ecology approach, the way the Colombian State has addressed the environmental conflicts caused by uncontrolled gold mining in black communities territories from the Colombian Pacific coast. I will argue that a land restitution policy carried out over territories that are on dispute for the control of its natural resources, should put at the center the environmental conflicts in order to guarantee the effective and sustainable restoration of territory. I will do this by analyzing the case of the regressive territorial restructuring of places and spaces (Holt-Gimenez 2008) of the Community Council of the Raposo river basin in Valle del Cauca, and other territories of the Pacific region in processes of restoration.