Community-based social protection before the gaze of the state

The recently elected President of Colombia promised during his campaign to provide state support to community-based social protection schemes, in particular to those originated in popular economies. In the context of Latin American debates, the term popular economies is proposed as an alternative to the concept of “informal economies” to highlight the heterogeneity, richness and complexity of the economic activities of popular sectors. As Malinowitz (2019) explains, political and academic debates that rely upon the concept of popular economies emphasize the complexity of the activities, organizations and rationalities present in the economic activities of popular sectors rather than on what they lack or their legal failures as discussion on informal economies focus on (Alessandrini, Cortés-Nieto, Eslava & Yilmaz Vastardis, 2022). Hence, discussions on popular economies talk about combinations of productive and reproductive labour, often devalued to different degrees, yet central to families’ survival and social reproduction. Drawing on Latin American feminist discussions, popular economies might be understood as sites of extraction and exploitation, but also of resistance and emancipation (Gago, 2018; Gago, Cielo & Gachet, 2018). They (sometimes) reveal ethics, logics and forms of organizing markets and economic activities that exceed and challenge those imposed by capitalism in its diversity (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2020). Inspired by these debates, a group of colleagues and I embarked on a research project aimed at analyzing the social and economic dynamics present in the territory Alto Fucha, a group of popular neighbourhoods located on the peripheries of Bogotá, on the mountains that surround the city. Through participatory cartographic exercises and the construction of a directory of jobs and economic initiatives of the popular economy, we sought to reflect on how economic reactivation in the aftermath of the pandemic might look like if the dynamics and knowledges of the popular economies are taken seriously. Given my legal background, I focused on social protection schemes that originated in community-based arrangements with the aim of thinking about the President’s promise of providing state support to them. In this paper, I discuss the advantages and disadvantages of bringing those arrangements before the gaze of the state. I explore the diversity of social protection dynamics (and their different guiding logics) that the research revealed, as well as the tensions and contradictions that state (and legal) interventions might bring about.