Paper short abstract:

The paper analyses the uses of traditional knowledge in the negotiations and implementation of a clean energy project in La Guajira, Colombia, and the position of anthropological research amidst this process.

Paper long abstract:

In 2002, Empresas Públicas de Medellín (EPM), a Colombian utility company, started the development of a clean energy project in La Guajira peninsula, Colombia, with a loan from the World Bank (WB). The project consisted in the installation of 15 wind turbines on the territory of the Wayúu people. The project became a scene of transnational negotiation about the role of "traditional" political leaders, respect for "indigenous" values, and rights over "ancestral" territories. The paradox I want to address in this paper is that a significant part of the knowledge about the matters of concern comes from anthropological research carried out in collaborations between Wayúu leaders and anthropologists in the context of emancipatory indigenous mobilisations during the 1980s. The clean energy project was subsequently named using an indigenous word (Jepirrachi), and has been praised by the WB as an inspiration and for the success of its "Operational Policy on Indigenous Issues". The paper firstly explores the main characteristics of the negotiation of the how "traditional knowledge" has become interpreted in the implementation of the project, and secondly analyses the conundrums faced by anthropologists studying such processes while trying to avoid the commoditisation of their knowledge and of the very social relationships from which it derives. The paper reflects on research currently being carried out with regard to EPM, the WB and the indigenous people involved in the project, and on the ethnographer's previous fieldwork with the Wayúu since 2007.