Today’s highlight was a fascinating story by a Peruvian of how local technocrats – trained at US universities – returned to Peru to peddle solutions to the country which were lapped up from 2000 but are now being rejected by the prevailing power structure - a strange blended mix of left and right.
Since taking office in July
2021, the so-called “left-wing” government and the ostensibly “right-wing”
National Congress have been working together to dismantle the weak scaffolding
that held our infant liberal democracy. This regression’s happening against the
backdrop of a savage rollback in the state’s capacity. The government has
removed career civil servants, reneged on the expectation that key ministries
should be withheld from political appointees and acted to undermine the
transparency and accountability gains.
This year, the Congress
passed two crucial pieces of legislation: removing oversight of higher
education standards and giving parents the right to approve all school teaching
materials.
This move has been promoted
by conservative groups, who want to stop the government from allowing educators
to teach important topics in schools, like sex education or encouraging
informed assessments of the roles that the Shining Path and
the Peruvian State played in the violence
of the 1980s and 1990s.
In May 2022, the National
Congress elected new members of the Constitutional Tribunal – Peru’s version of
the US Supreme Court. Four of its six members are aligned with supporters of
the previous laws. Many other liberal reforms made during the previous 20 years
are also at stake:
· Transport reforms (tackling informal transport providers).
· How parties can use resources during political campaigns (the
basis of several money laundering cases, involving the leaders of most
parties).
· Hard-earned minority rights.
· Freedom of information and expression.
· Environmental protection policies.
You may well think that a self-styled “left wing” government
and a primarily “right wing” congress should be at loggerheads. The reality is
more complex and interesting.
“Left” and “right” in Peru,
as in much of the world, are now meaningless political labels. Political power
provides economic and social opportunities – that’s what matters now in
Peruvian politics.
Peruvian parties are mercantilist operations – public prosecutors have even accused some of being criminal organisations, with clear private interests. This shift in priorities has made it easy for them to come to a tacit, multi-party understanding to undo the progressive reforms. It’s a new elite bargain.
I’ve never worked in South America – but, for some reason, the article struck home. I recognised the issue because, in 1990, I found myself invited by the WHO (Europe) Director of Public Health to help her develop a network of health promotion in the newly-liberated countries of Central Europe. It was a short-term contract of some 6 months but proved to be a launch-pad for my new career as consultant in “capacity (institutional) development” in both central Europe and central Asia. This was a fascinating experience which I’ve written about in Missionaries, mercenaries or witchdoctors? (2007) and “The Long Game – not the logframe” (2011) - presented to NISPAcee Conferences in which I took apart the superficiality of the assumptions EC bureaucrats were making about the prospects of its Technical Assistance programmes making any sort of dent in what I called (variously) the kleptocracy or “impervious regimes” of most ex-communist countries.
Basically my criticism was that project for institutional
change failed to understand the local contexts and cultures - and assumed that “good
practice blueprints” from elsewhere could be easily replicated – with a bit of
training.
One of the reasons I enjoyed my eight years in Central Asia from 1999 was that I had the freedom to take account of the local conditions and to design strategies which the local European Delegations had confidence would actually work. The “conditionalities” which governed the “candidate countries” of aspiring EU members in central Europe patently didn’t apply in Central Asia – and the “counterparts” with whom I worked had the intelligence and ability to be able to insist on “workable” strategies. In Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan, this produced results.
Last year I came across a rare book which helped me understand why – this was Helping People help themselves – from the World Bank to an alternative philosophy of technical assistance by David Ellerman (2006) which I wrote about at the time here - https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2021/06/helping-people-help-themselves.html
In my next post I hope to develop the theme
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