Self-determination

The right of Afrodescendant peoples to govern, sustain and recognise themselves.

Self-determination is a people’s capacity to decide over its territory, its economy and its own forms of organisation. In Colombia this has a concrete legal basis: transitional article 55 of the 1991 Constitution and Law 70 of 1993 recognised Black communities as an ethnic group with the right to collective title over their territories.

Recognising a right is not the same as exercising it. Our work concentrates on the distance between what the law says and what communities can actually do with their territory: the environmental governance of community councils, infrastructure decided from within, and the technical capacity to administer what is ours.