Fruit Trees

Not to go all Shugart on y'all...

One of the big problems municipalities have in these reforestation programs they carry out is how to get people to protect plants after they've been put in the ground. One municipality I visited up north pays a monthly fee for each tree that survives, but these guys down here in Cusco have another good idea.

They plant fruit trees.

By planting fruit trees, the local people have an incentive to protect the trees over the long term, since they stand to gain from the eventual harvest and sale of the fruit.

Something like 30,000 peach trees are about ready to be planted in Pucyura.

Town Meetings in Peru

First off, I've added a few (bad) pictures to the Cusco album in the sidebar. Check it out if you like painted campaign signs.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming...

Got a chance to go out to one of the Anta participatory budgeting fora today. Interesting. Anta is the province which implemented the participatory budgeting process in Peru, which, in theory, is supposed to be universal nowadays. Indeed, the institutions of participatory budgeting seem to be widespread, but the way the budgeting process is carried out, and whether or not the budget is carried through is an open question. I've met several people (in other places) who have said things like, "we were supposed to receive X soles in last year's budget, but the money was never provided."

In Anta, however, the process seems to be fairly well implemented, in a democratic way, and indeed, there seems to be some follow-through. Not only does the government seem to carry out the things the budget prioritizes, they have developed a simple but consistent way of prioritizing projects, which doesn't permit the districts to select projects which are contrary to the municipality's strategic development plan. In other places, such contradictions (between development plans and participatory budgets) have been a major complaint of municipal officials about the participatory budgeting processes.

The actual meeting took place outside the church in one of the rural villages in Anta, which chickens and stray dogs at our feet, and with a beautiful view out onto the valley which makes up most of the province.

Probably half the meeting was conducted in Quechua (some of which I understood fairly well), and the community was generally in reasonably strong agreement about their priorities in the budget--completion of an irrigation project which has already been started, and the introduction of clean drinking water and sewage/drainage to the community. Apparently, this sort of agreement is fairly unusual, and there are usually conflicts within communities, including between different factions, and conflict whipped up by individuals with political ambitions.

My take on the participatory budgeting process is thus:
1. It promotes transparency. The communities know what projects have been selected for completion, and therefore, know when things haven't been completed.
2. It promoted better decision-making. Although the prioritization of projects is ultimately performed by the mayor's office, the process feeds information to the mayor about the needs of the communities. Without such an extensive institutionalized process of interest articulation, local executives simply don't know as well what voters need and want.
3. It promotes a participatory culture. Repeatedly, interviewees have told me that the participatory budgeting process has changed citizens' ideas about government from "Kiss the hand" of the mayor (as one interviewee described it), to the expectation that the municipality has a duty to carry out projects for the citizen. This sort of culture makes it more likely that politicians will be punished for following their own personal agendas, and not the agenda of the communities.

Particularism vs. Pragmatism

...which gets me to another thing. How can you differentiate between "populism," which presumably has implications of irresponsibility, "pragmatism," which is presumably desirable, and "particularism," which is assumed to be undesirable.

Pragmatism has something to do with being practical and non-ideological.

Populism is a poorly defined term as well, but presumably has something to do with giving the people what they want. Maureen once pointed out to me that this is also a big part of democracy, but there are clearly times when governments do irresponsible things to satisfy public demand.

Particularism has something to do with corruption--politicians supporting policies that promote narrow interests (rather than the interests of the majority) in order to receive some advantage, either politically or economically.

Populism and particularism both are seen as undesirable, but they are also, in some ways, opposites.

So, when does a policy go from being particularistic to being pragmatic? Is the support of some local industry (a milk industry, for example) particularistic if it directly advantages only one small group of the population, not nearly a majority, even if it is promoting economic development that will have positive spillover effects and secondary effects for others in the area? The milk producers will, for example, buy products from local merchants and will use local transportation firms (taxis and buses, for example), to get around.

And when do you know when a government has gone from pragmatic to being populist? Is constructing homes for the impoverished populism if it will result in healthier children and more productive adults, even if it is, at its core, basically a handout?

These are normative questions--not to downplay normative questions, because they're important--but they also have practical implications. Effectively, where do you draw the line between desirable and undesirable policies at the local level? If I want to know when a government is doing a good job (which is clearly something that interests me), I need to know what a "good job" consists of.

Socialism, Capitalism, and Pragmatism

The last couple of days, I've been doing interviews in the province of Anta, right outside of Cusco, where I'm back living with the family I stayed with when I was doing my language training.

The government of Anta is controlled by the Peruvian Socialist Party--one of the only places where the party is a going concern. The socialists like to kick and scream about the state of the capitalist system, the financial crisis, and the way the Peruvian anticrisis package is helping the capitalists and hurting the rural people, but when it comes down to it, they're really pretty pragmatic in government, doing pretty non-socialist things like supporting local entrepreneurs in building a quality local dairy industry and training local restaurant owners in cooking in order to improve the local "gastronomic tourism" industry.

Some of these things sound like state-led capitalism to me. They're certainly doing things that Austrian style economists would disapprove of--the local government is certainly promoting certain industries at the expense of others--but they're also things that don't look terribly inefficient or anti-market to me. In fact, they seem to be helping to overcome development traps and market failures to make the market work more efficiently.

The local government has built and funded an artificial insemination post to improve the breeding of local cattle, and they buy wholesale quantities of seed for the improvement of pastureland and sell it to locals at cost. It doesn't seem entirely inappropriate to see this as a replacement for foreign direct investment, except without the foreign part. Effectively, the municipality is helping the locals to overcome a development trap--the absence of capital accumulation--to promote industries which would simply not have the opportunity for improvement without the government assistance otherwise.

It should be noted that, if the local officials are to be believed, the results have been impressive. They have increased the yield of the milk industry somewhat, but apparently the primary improvement has been the quality of the local product. While local cheese had previously been sold on blankets in the street, for example, they now produce cheese that's cleanly packaged in plastic, vacuum-sealed bags and sold in Peruvian supermarkets. If the local officials are to be believed, local government intervention was a necessary condition for the organization and capitalization of the dairy sector in Anta.

Clearly, of course, there are times when such government intervention doesn't work very well--and we all know how inefficient government can be. On the other hand, it's hard not to look at our economic situation today and think that sometimes, free markets aren't all that hot either. But state capture and the resulting inefficacy and inefficiency is a real concern in a place like this--but the province of Anta appears to have largely avoided that, thus far.

Of course, I could be wrong. But if I'm right, what's the explanation?

I don't have an answer at the moment--I need to keep doing interviews. But I wonder if the outcomes seen in Anta are a result of (a) a strong local party structure based on internal institutions which promote long-term party viability rather than short-term individual political viability, (b) the prior construction of institutions for democratic, downward accountability through transparency and elections, and (c) the early adoption of a median-voter strategy by the current government. This last one is a result of strategic interaction coming out of an awareness (by the local government) that they don't have as much wiggle room when it comes to pursuing self-enrichment through political office.

This doesn't explain, however, why the system hasn't resulted in particularistic, patronage politics, which I think should be a more likely result of the wild and wacky Peruvian local electoral system. But maybe that's what is going on, and I just haven't seen it yet.

Maybe next week...