Colombia has known three models of distributive policies (PD). Each one of them aimed at the redistribution of public resources based on criteria that swings between the political and the technical, and the formal and informal norms. Each system has developed an institutional and organizational design that promotes a certain type of intergovernmental relationships (RIG) and relationships between the executive and the legislative public powers. Paradoxically, in pursuit of the elimination of pork-barrel politics, the current system is the one that allows greater discretion to the executive power and is the least transparent. This text clarifies some aspects of distributive policies, makes a genealogy about the models in the country and extensively describes each one in terms of its institutional design, administrative organization and amounts possibly managed by legislators, also employing comparisons to other countries. It concludes with the need to pursue lines of research related to the subject, which provide valuable applied knowledge inputs.