Resource information
The rural roads program, overseen by
Provias Descentralizado (subdivision of Peru's Ministry
of Transportation and Communications), began in 1995, and
has received funds from the Peruvian Government, the World
Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. It is a
national program for the rehabilitation and maintenance of
roads that link rural communities and villages with
secondary and principal roads, and through these, with towns
and cities of the interior, thus expanding Peru's road
network to the rural village level, especially in regions
with greater levels of poverty. In its twelve years of
existence, the program has been evaluated several times in
terms of its impact on the economy (income levels, market
dynamics), on gender equity, on the culture of the high
Andes, on access to basic roads, and on rural living
conditions (access to education, health, etc.). However, no
effort had been made to systematically understand its
impacts on democracy and the quality of citizenship
exercised in rural areas. The study that is presented here,
commissioned by the World Bank in February 2007, has sought
to analyze PCR's impacts, using two general hypotheses
that make it possible to explore the relationships between
public roads and democracy. The first suggests that road
integration, particularly the rehabilitation and maintenance
of roads that link rural villages with district or
provincial capitals, decreases the costs of democratic
participation. In a context of increasing participatory
supply, due to the ongoing recurrence of national and
municipal electoral processes, as well as to the creation of
new rights of participation, new roads allow rural residents
to take part in democratic decision making processes without
having to incur significantly higher costs than those of
residents of urban centers. The second hypothesis is more
specific to the Peru Rural Roads Program (PCR, for its
Spanish acronym); it suggests that the way in which the
program operates, its institutional arrangements and the
institutions to which it provides its services, strengthens
democracy, and local civil society, strengthens new leaders,
improves local management skills, and aids in political
inclusion, particularly that of more vulnerable sectors.
