Peace with the environment: Community perspectives from the Andean-Amazon foothills of Colombia

Sammanfattning: Half a decade after the signing of the peace agreement between the Government of Colombia and the FARC-EP, the country continues to suffer from persisting violence and the need to address environmental destruction is more evident than ever. This research builds on a post-development critique of current peace efforts and responds to the call for including local perspectives in knowledge creation and development practice. By using photo-elicitation as data collection method, the study combines participatory and visual methods in order to explore alternative understandings of the relationship between the environment and peace, as well as resulting strategies by community-based organisations. The department of Caquetá serves as a particularly interesting case for exploring socio-environmental challenges due to its geographic location between the Andean foothills and the Amazon rainforest, and its historical importance for the conflict and peace processes. The resulting community-informed understanding highlights the importance integrating the environment into a vision of peace for local development strategies. Findings from this study therefore offer important theoretical and methodological insights for the growing field of environmental peacebuilding, and provide hope that constructing peace together with the environment can be possible.