Cross-Border Territorial Planning and Integration: Rethinking Development From the Margins

This article explores how war remade the Amazonian cross-border corridor between Colombia and Ecuador from 2000 to 2024. A sequential mixed-methods design combines official statistics from 2000–2015 with a qualitative update derived from a structured survey and multi-sited fieldwork conducted between 2015 and 2024 across five municipalities (3 in Colombia and 2 in Ecuador) encompassing approximately 120,000 internally displaced persons and 135,000 refugees and asylum seekers. It does so by following household trajectories from rural displacement to peri-urban settlement and cross-border movement. The findings suggest that protracted migration and uneven governance have forged a frontier that self-organizes through cooperation and daily circulation. Four iterative processes that capture this transformation are binding: restricted access to serviced land; household security and coping strategies; neighborhood organization; and pendular migration that links work, care, and essential services. These dynamics entrench multi-anchored residence as one of the long-term forms of incorporation and adaptation at the frontier. The study introduces the Cross-Border Amazonian Zone (ZTA) as an analytical and pragmatic framework through which territorial continuity between conflict and adaptive governance comes into view. It also considers that community planning and binational coordination could strengthen local capabilities and reduce the risk of renewed displacement in this border region.