Research
Public policy, governance, mining and infrastructure in Peru
Image: Puente Piedra village, Huamachuco, Peru (2016). The new primary school, funded through local government public investment projects, stands behind the church and plaza.
Negotiating the centre: Community and public investment projects
The growth of large-scale mining in Peru since the late 1990s has led to increased government budgets, and a proliferation of public investment projects largely allocated to infrastructure. My PhD thesis considers how projects are chosen and undertaken in the northern Andean District of Huamachuco.
Through ethnographic fieldwork, in collaboration with communities in urban Huamachuco and several rural villages, I explore how government processes become incorporated and adapted into local social relations, shaping the projects and their effects.
I argue that public investment projects act as central spaces, ‘boundary objects’*, which are mutually created by actors and through which power and social change are negotiated.
Collaboration
The research was made possible by the people of Huamachuco, who generously gave their time and shared their lives, knowledge and experience over a two year period. Particular thanks to all at the Municipality, who patiently and repeatedly explained how things worked, allowing me to attend meetings over several years. I am indebted to all in Huamachuco for their warm welcome and collaboration.
The work also reflects collaborations with many others in Peru and elsewhere on the subject of mining and socio-economic change since 2011, may thanks to all who have knowingly or otherwise influenced and enabled this project.
Summary findings for public policy and social change:
Where many assume lack of ‘development’ is down to lack of ‘capacity’ at a local level in Peru, I find that current international and national governance structures and rules make it extremely difficult for local actors to to create locally meaningful development policies and projects.
Key areas for change are identified within budget and planning cycles, and rules regulating public spending.
I provide an empowering, hopeful argument for how social change takes place through repeated interactions at and between all levels (international-national-local).
Through central spaces (boundary objects*), different individuals and communities engage with each other in the course of daily and longer-term interactions to negotiate social change.
In the conscious daily use of these boundary objects, spaces and moments, potential power can be realised.
*Star, S.L., Griesemer, J.R., 1989. Institutional Ecology , ’ Translations ’ and Boundary Objects : Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley ’ s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology , 1907-39. Soc. Stud. Sci. 19, 387–420.
I demonstrate how projects are articulated into ideals of moral communal behaviour, becoming a focus for the negotiation of relative identities and ‘progress’. I argue that whilst national government rules and processes for projects claim certainties and knowledge conducive to progress, there are inherent uncertainties due to global gold price fluctuations, timings of tax receipts and unequal social negotiations over the division of resources. National government policies and government structures thereby transfer risk to local actors, such that if projects do not produce desired effects, local actors are blamed for incompetence.
This transfer of uncertainty to local actors reinforces networks of relationships of obligation of an idealised moral community, whereby local actors seek to hold each other to account and increase certainty, both through rumours of corruption and the reinforcement of networks of obligation. Rural and urban actors work through and around the rules to negotiate local projects and increase access to benefits of local government budgets.
From design to implementation of the projects, the thesis shows how they are sites of power and hierarchy simultaneously including and excluding rural actors. Projects are assessed as mutually constructive sites through which rural villages can build relationships with politicians, civil servants and businesspeople, to provide possibilities, albeit limited, to incrementally challenge power relations. In their creation and use, projects become active monuments to ideals of communal progress and the relationships that make them.