Administrative co-evolution: Penality and welfare in Colombia's child protection system

Abstract

This article examines the administrative co-evolution of penal and welfare logics in Colombia's child protection system. Moving beyond Northern narratives of rupture and hybridity, it conceptualises penality and welfare as mutually reinforcing logics that developed together through an expanding administrative apparatus. Within this framework, welfare provision generates surveillance infrastructure while coercive oversight becomes legitimised as necessary protection. By framing risks and harms as products of individual responsibility, this administrative model justifies expansive intervention while evading structural transformations. Despite shifting from judicial to administrative procedures, the system has retained and expanded its coercive foundations. Most paradoxically, human rights discourses since the 1990s have further intensified administrative coercion by recasting systemic failures as individual rights violations requiring prolonged surveillance and institutionalisation.