The Emergence of de facto Bureaucratic Priorities: Extending Urban Citizenship in fin-de-millénaire Lima, Peru

ABSTRACT

I outline an underappreciated explanation for states’ de facto policy-implementation priorities, contrast it with existing explanations, and apply it to the Peruvian state’s extension of “urban citizenship” (squatter residence legalization) in late-twentieth century Lima. Bureaucratic priorities emerge from both the intervention of the bureaucracy tasked with policy implementation and local-level actors found in the policy-implementation arena it targets. Qualitative evidence shows that the legalization bureaucracy encountered neighborhood elites who tried to obstruct the extension of urban citizenship. Quantitative evidence suggests that these actors were unevenly distributed across space and that the state prioritized settlements according to their relative absence.

KEYWORDS:

• The state
• urban citizenship
• squatter settlements
• local leaders

Acknowledgments

I thank Edwin F. Ackerman, Julio Calderón Cockburn, Luis García Ayala, Robert S. Jansen, Mark Mizruchi, Gustavo Riofrío Benavides, George Steinmetz, Brady T. West, Antonio Zapata Velasco, and Robin Zheng for their criticisms, comments, and help. I alone am responsible for errors. This research was supported in part by a fellowship from the Social Science Research Council with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the University of Michigan’s International Institute and Department of Sociology, and the Tinker Foundation.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Myriad terms are used to denote these figures, varying by researcher, country, and period.

2. Research on Mexico City, Mexico concludes much the same: “the regularization of land tenure by governmental action may sharply diminish the [neighborhood elite’s] … opportunities for extracting personal profit from control of land use within the community” (Cornelius 1975:152, see also 161, 194).

3. Everyone who works on this topic knows that neighborhood elites are important actors. But there is a glaring omission in the literature on their persistence over time and why that matters – as is my focus.

4. Large parts of the street-level bureaucracy literature obviously focus on other things as well, including bureaucrats’ personal backgrounds (Dubois 2010), bureaucrat-client interactions across races (Watkins-Hayes 2009), variation between national welfare bureaucracies (Jewell 2007), etc.

5. These individuals agreed to disclose their identities. They are: Fernando Cantuarias Salaverry, Chief of Operations for COFOPRI from June 1996 to December 2000 (interviewed in Lima, 12 September 2017); Edgardo Mosqueira, National Coordinator of COFOPRI during the late 1990s (interviewed in Washington, DC, 6 June 2016); and Raúl Ravina, analyst for the Operations Division for COFOPRI starting in 1997 and Manager of Titling from November 1999 through 2000 (interviewed in Lima, 1 March 2016).

6. Unlike the neighborhood effects literature, which is interested in identifying the spatially-circumscribed characteristics of residents’ dispositions and practices, and therefore cautions against using administrative units as analytic units, I do use districts as my unit of analysis because my object is a state bureaucracy’s spatially-uneven practices. See Appendix for a discussion of the criteria used to identify the “squatter districts” included in the analysis.

7. The variable includes every day during which a protest occurred in which (a) the actor was “poblador,” “AA.HH.” (asentamientos humanos), or “organizaciones de pueblos jóvenes,” unless the action was “invasión”; and (b) the demand made it obvious that the actors were squatters. See Appendix for more information.

8. See Appendix for a discussion of variable construction.

9. These are time-invariant percentages of the overall number of residences established in each of the squatter districts during each period. See Appendix for a discussion of data sources and variable construction, and its Table A2 for descriptive statistics.

10. We are interested in the ratio since the count number of eligible residences had an impact on the number of legalized residences but is not itself of interest.

11. In 1993, census enumerators estimated that, of the 394,614 residences in squatter districts, 80,240 were squatted (“ocupada de hecho,” as opposed to owned, rented, and other). But, as noted above, the legalization agency issued titles for 367,804 residences in these districts from 1996 through 2000 – many more than enumerators had counted. It is perhaps unsurprising that enumerators’ reports undercounted squatted residences, since squatters had good reason to obscure the legal status of their residences in the absence of countervailing reasons to reveal it – and no such reasons existed at that time. But there is no indication that enumerators systematically counted more squatter residences in some districts than others. Thus, while clearly an underestimate, there is no reason it cannot be used as a gauge of the relative size of the squatter resident population in each district by including it in the model as an offset variable. Another reason it is important to include in the model stems from the fact that previous governments had already legalized some residences (see Appendix, Table A1). To the extent that those rights persisted, an overall count of the number of residences would not be the best offset variable. Given these considerations, I use the census’s figure for squatted residences as an offset variable to estimate the proportion of eligible residences in each of the squatter districts.

12. Since the estimated number of eligible residences is fewer than the number legalized, a binomial regression approach would be inappropriate for modeling this outcome. The Poisson models used capture changes in the count of title deeds issued over time. A model also including random intercepts would be inappropriate because there was minimum variability in titles issued in 1996 (the state did not begin to legalize residences in most districts until 1997), which is the reference year in the models. The multi-level models accommodate for correlations of repeated district measurements.

13. The Fujimori government confronted a sizable legalization deficit. The governments in power since the middle of the century had together issued fewer than a quarter million titles in Lima (see Appendix, Table A1). (Information about the spatial distribution of these titles is unavailable. However, informants interviewed for this article said that much of the legalization completed prior to 1996 had to be redone because it had not been completed correctly.) This deficit generated considerable discontent and became a salient political issue, prompting the central government to re-centralize the authority to legalize squatter lands (Calderón Cockburn 2005:204).

14. In 1997 Peru solicited, and in 1998 received, financial assistance from the World Bank, but by then the policy had been selected, the bureaucracy had been established, and implementation was underway.

15. Resolución Suprema N° 110-97-MTC, Resolución Suprema N° 111-97-MTC, Resolución Suprema N° 112-97-MTC, Resolución Suprema N° 113-97-MTC (all 21 July 1997), all COFOPRI; interview, 6 June 2016.

16. Memorandum N° 018-96-COFOPRI-GL, Resolución Ministerial N° 289-96 MTC/15.01 (19 and 20 June 1996, respectively), both COFOPRI.

17. Resolución Ministerial N° 261-97-MTC/15.01 (24 June 1997), COFOPRI.

18. Resolución Ministerial N° 314-97-MTC/15.01 (21 July 1997), COFOPRI.

19. COFOPRI’s reasons for selecting local representatives may have been related to its ambition to secure and then retain funding for the legalization initiative, given the importance that international lending agencies attribute to them.

20. If I examined the entire country, the association would of course be negative. But since I examine only Lima, it still serves to undermine the commonsense view that logistical feasibility is a driver of priorities.

21. In this model, the first, second, fifth, and sixth period variables are also positively and significantly associated with prioritization – suggesting that neighborhood elites were ultimately unable to stave off regularization – though of course their respective magnitudes are considerably smaller.

22. While the welfare policy implementation literature brackets societal lumpiness by only considering cases in which beneficiaries are on the state’s turf, usually the benefits office, the forbearance literature obscures it by assuming beneficiaries are an undifferentiated “poor” (Holland 2016:232-37).

23. As one reviewer suggested, a research design comparing one part of Lima with and one part without rent-seeking neighborhood elites would provide a good means of confirming and further elucidating the mechanism outlined in this article.

24. Although Callao also forms part of the Lima metropolitan area, I excluded its districts because its government counted squatter settlements differently than Lima’s, making the respective data incommensurable.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Simeon J. Newman

Simeon J. Newman is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan who works in the areas of political, comparative-historical, and urban sociology and in social theory, political economy, and the philosophy of the social sciences.