The Limits of Social Capital in Fragile Water Governance: Deliberative Non-Differentiation in the Colombian Amazon

Abstract

Water governance in the Colombian Amazon is shaped by institutional fragmentation, the marginalization of local and ancestral knowledge, and a disconnect between water conservation and territorial development. This article applies a social multi-criteria evaluation (NAIADE) and a territorially situated prospective analysis to two contrasting Amazonian municipalities, Puerto Caicedo (Putumayo) and Puerto Nariño (Amazonas), to examine how strategic actors evaluate alternative water governance scenarios. Working from participatory workshops, documentary analysis, and an actor characterization, we elicited actor judgments on five governance scenarios across 10 criteria and analyzed them with this method, reporting the two preorders and their intersection rather than a single synthetic index. Contrary to the expectation that the more socially cohesive, predominantly indigenous municipality would converge on a distinct preferred scenario, both municipalities exhibit weak to absent discrimination among scenarios: Puerto Caicedo shows complete indifference across all five alternatives, and Puerto Nariño does not distinguish among continuity, active community participation, and interinstitutional coordination, while clearly rejecting external dependence and purely technological solutions. Coalition structures are similar in both sites, reaching complete fusion at comparable similarity levels. We interpret this shared non-differentiation as an expression of generalized institutional fragility under post-normal conditions. The article contributes a transparent and reproducible NAIADE-to-prospective workflow, comparative evidence that contrasting structural social capital endowments do not by themselves produce divergent deliberative outcomes here, and a diagnosis-to-instrument design logic for fragile contexts.