Current Projects — Alejandro Ponce de León

A Limnology of the State: Expertise, Statecraft, and the Politics of Waterforms in the Cauca Valley, Colombia (1910–1988)

(University of California, Davis. Doctoral dissertation)

This research project focuses on the political, economic, and technoscientific practices that make modern rivers in the contemporary Cauca Valley (Colombia), an eco-region with a long history of contention around the distribution of water use and land ownership. Through archival research and ethnographic writing, I examine the material, affective, and conceptual forces of technological revolutions and their aftermaths as they make—and unmake—rivers. More specifically, my work examines how people, water, mud, crops, technologies, and calculative devices interact through practice, forming 'rivers' while considering how these practices relate to global discussions about river management and ecological well-being.

Chapter 1 traces the early emergence of volume-based hydric statecraft in the Cauca Valley. Rooted in hydrological science, volume and flow became central to provincial state efforts to render waterbodies legible to legal, technical, and infrastructural intervention. Amid economic modernization initiatives and plans, rivers and wetlands were no longer approached as bounded natural features, but as quantifiable volumes to be inscribed on charts, governed through levees and norms, and allocated among competing users. Drawing on technical reports and government archives from the Departamento del Valle del Cauca, I show how volumetric reasoning enabled new relations between riverine ecologies and state actors and articulated emergent forms of jurisdiction. As engineers and legal officials grappled with rapidly changing volumes, state capacities were co-produced through a gathering of knowledge practices, material devices, and juridical forms.

This is a map of southwestern Colombia using data from the HydroSHEDS (RIV) - South America river network at 30s resolution. You see the Cauca basin to your left and the Magdalena basin to your left.

Chapter 2 analyzes the production of river basin governance through the archives of the Corporación Autónoma Regional del Valle del Cauca (CVC), the first institution in Latin America to adopt integrated basin planning. It attends to the basin as a technopolitical form central to the reorganization of regional statehood under General Rojas Pinilla’s military regime. David E. Lilienthal, former chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), actively promoted the CVC, marking one of the earliest international efforts to replicate TVA-inspired governance abroad. In the upper Cauca Valley, the basin-form enabled the articulation of earlier initiatives around infrastructure, agricultural modernization, and hydropower. Drawing on CVC board minutes, World Bank archives, and Lilienthal’s diaries, I argue that the basin did not preexist its governance; it was produced through technical abstractions that recast territorial complexity as manageable through expertise. Yet this form was also contested, as local communities, landowners, and institutions challenged the meanings of development, governance scale, and regional authority.

Chapter 3 studies the technosocial life—and death—of the Cauca River Regulation Project (CRRP), the megaproject implemented by CVC between 1955 and 1993. Drawing on CVC board minutes, technical documents, and firsthand accounts, it examines how the CRRP—conceived initially as a basin-wide program for flood control—was gradually reoriented toward energy dispatch, financial calculation, and revenue extraction. Rather than a coherent policy enacted by a technocratic state, the CRRP emerges as a dense and unstable formation through which anticipatory action, contested values, and technical abstraction materialized competing visions of territory, economy, and governance. The chapter attends to how engineers, financiers, officials, and communities negotiated what the project should protect—via the degree of protection index—under what conditions, and at what cost, embedding those choices into operational formulas and built structures. Engaging political ecology scholarship, the chapter foregrounds the compositive labor through which projects stabilize claims—often only briefly—while displacing other modes of life, use, and relation.

Fuel(ing) the City: A DIY Kit for Energy Stewardship

(With Victoria Mohr & Philipp Simon, University of California, Berkeley)

Fueling the City: A DIY Kit for Energy Stewardship is a hands-on workshop designed to foster storytelling, imagination, and reflection on energy circuits that connect landscapes, cities, and people. Building simple models and creating electric circuits, participants are invited into a dialogue to evaluate energy systems and envision future energy networks rooted in justice and collaboration.

As it continues to develop, the project aims to establish a replicable program and DIY kit that equips participants with accessible tools—such as low-cost Arduino-based prototypes—for imagining renewable energy solutions in public spaces. The goal is to encourage residents, community members, experts, and stakeholders to reimagine their city through localized “energy sovereignty storytelling” (Castro et al. 2024).

Located in the San Francisco Bay, California, the “Contra Costa Refinery Belt” is home to five refineries that stand around dense urban areas—serves as a case study. These refineries have significant repercussions on the community, biodiversity, and environment, with issues such as oil spills, explosions, and volatile pollutants historically affecting environmental and human health. Community-based monitoring programs, such as Purple Air, currently respond to citizens’ demands for air quality and accountability, but can public spaces encapsulate community aspirations for clean-energy landscapes while reducing dependency on fossil fuels as a form of social protest?

By activating new narratives and fostering hands-on engagement with energy infrastructure, Fuel(ing) the City contributes to a broader vision of an equitable and localized energy transition. It nurtures imagination while teaching accessible tech skills and invites place-based reflection on how communities might reconfigure energy systems toward shared, just futures.

**Hydrocommons Map (entre—ríos)**

The Hydrocommons Map is a collaborative initiative designed to identify projects, collectives, and communities dedicated to the care and defense of water ecosystems in Latin America. The goal of this mapping effort is to create a platform that fosters the comparison, connection, and strengthening of research, activism, and outreach initiatives that bring together community-based and creative practices around water. It aims to promote an understanding of water as a shared common good and contribute to eco-social resilience and sustainability. The initiative also aims to facilitate future collaborations, alliances, and exchanges that deepen the relationship between communities and their local water bodies. The map will also serve as a tool for tracking the impact of these initiatives, providing insights into what is effective in community activism—and what isn’t.

We invite you to complete the following form, which will help us learn more about your project, collective, or community. Below, you will find an initial version of the map.

Testimony to/of a mourning planet: art, recognition, and justice beyond the human in Latin America

(School of Advanced Study, University of London. Visiting fellow)

This project brings together scholars, artists, and activists attending to other-than-human forms of suffering and testimony-making in Latin America to shed new light on theories of multispecies and planetary justice. It asks: How do claims for environmental justice, artistic practices, and territorial activism encounter one another, and how might these encounters foster legal theories rooted in mutual recognition, where all are addressed as equals deserving of dignity and respect?

The project will comprise three distinct two-hour discussions centered on sound, silence, and dialogue as grounding notions. The sessions will bring together activists from regions experiencing environmental injustices, Latin American bio-artists whose practice broadens modes of attention and sensibility towards our shared worlds, and UK-based academics studying the political, legal, and ethical implications of such ontological openings.

Engaging in coalitional thinking, this project's objective goes beyond the discussion of legal idioms. It seeks to create a space where participants can explore sensory, conceptual, and affective dimensions in a more-than-human justice framework, with an emphasis on the embodied practices needed to attend to our planet's inaudible mourning.