Headin' Back

Heading Home:
Heading home on an 11:35PM flight from Lima to Houston, then arriving in Denver at about 9:30AM tomorrow morning. Don't have much time this visit--only about a week and a half--but it's enough time to visit Emily. We've been apart this time for about three months, which is the longest we've ever been apart (just keep breaking those records, unfortunately).

Although my flight doesn't leave until late tonight, I decided to head to the airport quite early, since I didn't have anything planned for the day, I needed to be checked out of my hostel room and the airport is pretty comfortable. I was hoping that I could check my bags when I arrived, but perhaps predictably, the Continental counter doesn't open until much later tonight, so I'll be hanging around for a while.

Meeting with Jaramillo:
Had a really good meeting with Dr. Miguel Jaramillo, my Peruvian contact down here. He seemed to be impressed with my field research. In truth, I can say that's the first time an academic has responded positively to the results of these interviews. Most of the other responses I've been (from David Brown and Krister, among others) are primarily skeptical.

My feelings on my research:
After doing this kind of research, I have to say that I'm a lot less skeptical of the approach, myself. There are some problems with the way the incentive structure of the field wants us to find results--and we can't put in all kinds of time doing research, then get anywhere by saying, "nothing's going on," but in general, I feel as though I really can say that my results, in a qualitative way, are pretty strong. When you can see the same thing over and over again, in municipality after municipality, and the manifestations of a given mechanism manifest themselves in so many ways, I would have to say that the results of those findings are pretty strong.

Participatory Fora and Qualitative Research
Participatory fora, for example, seem to work through (among other things) an information dissemination mechanism. People attend these meetings, and in the meetings, they find more out about what policies the government is going to pursue. They can then pretty much decide for themselves, as the years go on, whether the municipality is doing its job. For example, in two of the districts I visited near Cusco, the municipality had promised to build an irrigation system over the course of three years. In each of those districts, the people in the district were able to ask detailed, educated questions about the way in which the irrigation system was being built, indicating that they already know a great deal about how the system is being built. And if the system was not being built, they would know it.

I saw the flip side of the process in Carhuaz, near Huaraz. There, the municipality wasn't doing its job, and all of the local citizens knew it. They were aware that certain projects had been budgeted for, and that they had not been completed (or, in some cases, even started).

I would contrast this to Guatemala, where there is primarily a one-way process of information flow regarding the decisions the municipality. Citizens pass information to their municipal governments through their COCODEs and COMUDEs (those are community and municipal development councils), but the information flow regarding the priorities set by the government, and regarding which projects they are supposed to carry out, doesn't flow back down to the citizenry as easily (these councils are not intended as two-way transmission mechanisms, and fewer citizens are involved), which means that there is a lot more uncertainty among the voters regarding how well the government is doing its job.

In general, it would be difficult to observe these differences in a quantitative way. Possible, yes, but time consuming and expensive: you would probably need to have surveys at the local level. Further, it would be difficult to extract these conclusions from a quantitative survey without having some theoretical basis for them in the first place--and how are you going to come up with the right ideas on your own, without some qualitative observations to start from?