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?

Participatory Fora

Being as I'm out of people to interview up in Pucyura, but I don't fly out of belly-buttonville until Tuesday, I've been doing a little bit of writing, trying to get started on this "participatory forum" stuff that I'm supposedly supposed to be researching. I feel like I've made some progress on that front--I've written about some of these ideas before, so I won't repeat them in depth, but I feel like I have a pretty good handle on the way these fora function:
* transmitting information to politicians about citizens' needs and preferences
* transmitting information to citizens about politicians' performance
* promoting changes in local political culture)

...and why they're created:
* to bind successors to a given set of policies
* to promote transparency in order to convince voters that you're really not the crook that they assume all politicians to be
* to promote the development of local industry based on ninja fighting skills and the production of high-quality, locally manufactured cheeses

So now that I've got that all figured out, and have a little bit of evidence, all I have to do is write it up, right?

Participatory Fora as Commitment Mechanisms

One of the most important (and maybe the most interesting) things that I'm working on down here in Peru is finding out why participatory fora--basically, citizen-based problem-solving roundables, have an effect on local agricultural policy outcomes. Why is it that they have an impact on policy, when many of the other (more typical) things we expect to impact policy don't really seem to work down here. In addition, how do these fora arise? And how do they work--that is, what is the mechanism through which they have an effect on policy?

First, let me hit a little background. One of the weird things about Peru is that many of the standard rational-choice factors that impact policy in other places don't have an impact here. For example, in Bolivia and Guatemala (among a great many other places), governments seem to pay more attention to agricultural policy or forestry policy when (a) they make money off of those policies, (b) the central government is pressuring them to do so, especially through the use of economic incentives, and (c) voters have in interest in those policies and will vote them out of office if they don't carry through on supporting agricultural policy, etc...

These seem like pretty common-sense things. They should have an effect on policy, at least in theory, right? Funny thing is, they don't really work here in Peru. When we run regressions, variables that represent those factors don't seem to be statistically significant (at least at the p < .95 level).

However, one of the things that does have an impact here are these "participatory problem solving fora." Basically, where people can get together with representatives of the municipality and try to figure out common solutions for their problems.

So, the first question is, why do these fora have an impact? Often, they have no formal powers--they're merely advisory. And even where they're legally empowered, anyone who has spent much time down here knows that having a written law is often a far cry from having that law carried out.

The second question is, why do they come about? Who creates them, and why? If they work at having an effect on policy, how we get more of them? Over the last week or so, I've had some real luck in getting some good, straight answers to these questions.

First off, "participatory fora" are a way for the mayor and other municipal actors to gain the trust and cooperation of the citizenry in a country where politicians are typically regarded as universally corrupt. For a corrupt politician, participatory fora might take away some (or much) of the discretion that can make being the mayor such a lucrative situation. For an honest politician, however, who with political (not economic) ambitions, who hopes to make a career in politics (long time horizons), participatory fora are a good way to convince the citizens that they're really doing what they say they're doing.

Also, participatory fora are a commitment mechanism. Although municipal administrations give up some control of policy when they allow it to be guided by these fora, having broad citizen participation in the creation of policy (a) makes citizens aware of policy, and (b) makes it more politically costly to change policies that citizens created. As such, participatory budgeting can be a mechanism to increase the odds that the policies created by one administration will be carried through by the following administration. This makes it easier for municipal governments to work with other actors who may have longer time horizons--entrepreneurs, investors, and citizens who only are willing to participate in a costly (though beneficial) policy if it is really carried through.