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Land rental markets often accompany irrigation infrastructure development as water availability revalorizes land. Agrarian change scholars critique land rental markets for contributing to capital accumulation. To date, however, this approach has not incorporated the roles of environmental changes induced by irrigation, corresponding social-ecological interactions, and political ecologies of vulnerability. Based on 12 months of research in Colombia’s most expensive land rental market spanning two irrigation megaprojects, this paper demonstrates how land rental markets compound environmental stresses to exclude producers from land- and water-based agricultural livelihoods. The research additionally advances debates of land control, capital’s mobility, and Andean water infrastructure development. 

Suspended infrastructure of megaprojects marks Latin American landscapes. However, little research has attended to the social-environmental and political-ecological processes of such infrastructure. Moreover, while social conflict often accompanies infrastructure development, our research emphasizes citizen contestation of the suspension and dynamic spatial unevenness as a claim on the state to complete the project. This study examines Colombia’s largest suspended irrigation infrastructure, the Tolima Triangle Irrigation District, through a combined political ecology and social-ecological systems framework. Results of integrated analysis show how the suspension drives differentiation in resource use and the social responses of individuals and communities to deepening disparities. In turn, public contestation of suspended infrastructure drives future prospects for the Tolima megaproject. Data is drawn from field research conducted for one year in 2018-2019. Mixed methods included semi-structured interviews, environmental assessment techniques, household surveys, and ethnographic participant observation. The research demonstrates that suspended infrastructure is neither a politically neutral, merely passive backdrop nor void of transformation but rather is comprised of contested processes rooted in the expanding social-environmental and political-ecological unevenness of development. Our findings contribute to the research on infrastructure suspension and development, and they are set within a broader body of scholarship on irrigation and political ecology of Latin American countries. 

This intervention considers how the writings of María Lugones, a philosopher of feminist decolonial theory, might shape a callejera [streetwalker] feminist decolonial methodology and what such a methodology might look like in practice. I describe how a callejera methodology foments deeper relationality by highlighting as methodological tools three of Lugones’ concepts: resisting ↔ oppressing, the collective and tantear en la oscuridad. To ground the theory and illustrate possibilities of deeper relationality offered by a callejera methodology, I reflect on on-going research with Colombian collectives actively negotiating experiences of indigeneity and womanhood in relation to histories of colonial and more recent armed violence, as well as ongoing state disinvestment. I make three contributions. First, I suggest that integrating an intersectional analytic of ‘both/and’ with the complex fluidity between Lugones’ concept of resisting ↔ oppressing permits scholars to better understand the negotiation of multiple, intermeshed identities and oppressions, social inequality and power relations in relation to colonial histories and presents. Second, I encourage geographers to embrace a decolonial lens attentive to the relationality between and among collectives, from which many acts of resistance begin. Finally, I consider how a callejera methodology considers coalitional work as central to the research process. Such work embraces difficulty, discomfort and messy relationality often negotiated as if walking blindly through the dark (tantear). I conclude by arguing that geographers’ relationally-based research can strengthen feminist decolonial thought in our attention to spatial and temporal scalar differences of place and our commitment to understanding contextually differentiated navigations of identity.