The politics of restless motion: water governance and state formation in Colombia’s upper Cauca basin, 1910–1940

This article examines the early emergence of volume-based modes of water governance in southwestern Colombia. Rooted in hydrological science, volume and flow became central to the state’s efforts to render waterbodies legible to legal, technical, and infrastructural intervention. In the context of economic modernization, rivers and wetlands were no longer encountered as bounded natural features, but as volumes of water that could be inscribed on charts, governed through levees and norms, and allocated across competing users. Drawing on technical reports and government archives, I trace how volumetric reasoning afforded new relations between riverine ecologies and state actors and articulated new forms of jurisdiction. As engineers and legal officials grappled with the changing volumes of waterbodies, I show that state capacities were co-produced through a gathering of emergent knowledge practices, material devices, and juridical forms – an assemblage that sedimented, paradoxically, around the abstraction of water in motion.