City

Analysis of Urban Change, Theory, Action

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Improving local governance with citizen

engagement?
Quotidian participatory mechanisms in two middle-class districts in Lima, Peru

Viktor Bensus

To cite this article: Viktor Bensus (2021) Improving local governance with citizen engagement?,
City, 25:1-2, 88-107, DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2021.1885913

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2021.1885913

Published online: 22 Feb 2021.

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 Improving local governance with
citizen engagement?
Quotidian participatory
mechanisms in two middle-class
districts in Lima, Peru
Viktor Bensus

Recent studies have focused on participatory innovations—implemented

over the past three decades in cities around the world—as a means to
improve local governance and citizen involvement in decision making.
This paper focuses on an overlooked type of innovations, quotidian
participatory mechanisms (QPMs). Using a case study of two different
middle-class districts in the metropolitan area of Lima, this paper argues
that municipalities implemented QPMs to reconcile their need for
economic growth and service provision, shifting from long-term planning
to routine problem-solving. QPMs have three central characteristics: the
search for efficient solutions to quotidian problems, the individualized
treatment of public urban issues, and the use of new information and
communication technologies. By excluding deliberation, QPMs can
reshape the relationship between residents and local government in two
ways. They can either foster a customer-citizen logic or a patronage
logic. In so doing, QPMs help to socialize citizens over how to participate
and define what content falls under the scope of participation, reducing
participation to a level of tokenism by excluding its political dimension.

 Keywords participatory innovations, urban governance, quotidian participatory mechanisms,

civic engagement, local participation, Lima
88 URL https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2021.1885913
© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 Bensus: Improving local governance with citizen engagement?

R
ecent studies have focused on participatory innovations—implemented
over the past three decades in cities around the world—as a means to
improve local governance and encourage citizen involvement in public
decision making. These innovations include mechanisms such as Participatory
Budgeting, town hall meetings, and hearings with authorities. They are the result
of a “generalized consensus” about the need to include citizen participation
mechanisms to enhance governance and the quality of democracy (Baiocchi
and Ganuza 2017). These innovations respond to citizenry’s demands for
transparency and inclusion in local decision-making processes, and to the new
communication channels that social media and information and communication
technologies have opened. Furthermore, participatory innovations are the result
of local governments’ need to address the challenges from decentralization
processes, associated with revenue allocation and investment attraction. When
implemented and institutionalized, these participatory innovations help to
socialize citizens into how to participate and help define what content falls
under the scope of participation.
This paper focuses on a subgroup of these innovations that I call quotidian
participatory mechanisms (QPMs), which are implemented and used for local
governance. These mechanisms are quotidian in their frequency, as well as in the
form they deal with public issues. I focus on QPMs for two main reasons. First,
since they are based on the personalized treatment of citizens’ demands and
complaints, local governments present them as models of direct democracy—
something that remains to be tested. Second, because the actions and dynamics
of everyday life play an essential role in shaping political dispositions and
actions, routine problem-solving reflects the rhythms of local life (Auyero and
Benzecry 2017).
Participatory innovations do not develop in a vacuum. They are related to
broader political and economic processes (Guarneros-Meza 2009). For instance,
neoliberal reforms from the 1990s made the attraction of real estate investments
and local taxpayers crucial for local governments’ funding (Barr and Dietz
2006). Moreover, decentralization and municipal reforms introduced local
participation as a feature of neoliberal governance in the 2000s (Remy 2011;
Calderón 2012). Therefore, the recent expansion of neoliberal governmentality
at the national and local scales is vital to understand participatory innovations
in Peru.
However, the political-economic context offers only a partial explanation
since participation design and its implementation shape both the citizen-
government relationship and the content of the demands presented. As research
in the Global South argues, some innovations have engaged middle classes in
local governance (Ellis 2012), providing them with more influence compared to
that of the urban poor (Ghertner 2011; Caldeira and Holston 2015). Nevertheless,
middle-classes’ engagement in governance is highly variable (Lemanski and
Tawa Lama-Rewal 2013). It may include these residents’ demands for rights
based on being taxpayers—what I refer to as a “customer-citizen logic.” At the
same time, the relationship between residents and local governments can favor
patronage politics.
Inspired by those debates, this paper discusses how the main participatory
mechanisms implemented by local governments in recent years—QPMs—shape 89
City 25–1–2

citizen engagement in urban local governance and planning. Although prior

research assumes that participatory innovations are an end in themselves,
my research situates QPMs within the broader socioeconomic context of
Lima. Furthermore, my case study examines how different designs and
implementations shape variable relationships between middle-class residents
and local officials.
To address these issues, I juxtapose QPMs in two urban districts in the
metropolitan area of Lima,1 which have a large middle-class population:
Miraflores and San Miguel. In Miraflores—a mostly upper-middle-class district,
I highlight the Governing with the Resident2 model with weekly hearings. In
San Miguel—a district with higher socioeconomic diversity, I describe the
Community Participation Promoters3 model. The focus on two middle-class
districts responds to three main reasons. First, they were two of the districts
with the highest concentration of new construction during the real estate boom
in Lima. Second, as the spread of weekly hearings suggests (see Cohaila 2016),
participatory innovations in middle-class districts can be exemplary for others.
Finally, this paper engages in discussion with some of the main assumptions
and findings of the literature about middle-classes’ participation in urban
governance and planning.

Urban governance and participatory innovations

Local participation is usually presented as the sine qua non of urban governance,
understood as “the configuration of interactions between public and private
actors with a view of achieving collective (not private) goals in a particular
[urban] territory” (Melo and Baiocchi 2006, 591). Processes such as state
reforms, group and individual social action, and—particularly significant for
this research—urbanization patterns continuously reshape this relationship
(Guarneros-Meza and Geddes 2010).
However, not every type of civic engagement in governance and planning is
inclusive of citizens’ ideas. For instance, Arnstein’s (1969) “ladder of participation”
identifies some types of involvement that do not constitute participation, others
that are tokenistic (e.g. informing, consultation, and placation), and those that
empower citizens by including them in decision-making processes. What
differentiates tokenistic and the citizen-empowerment types of engagement is
that the latter format fosters the political dimension of participation, for which
citizen deliberation is a crucial element (Fung and Wright 2001). Therefore, the
legitimacy of participatory mechanisms lies in the quality of the deliberation
such mechanisms promote (or not) (Mansbridge et al. 2012).
Participatory innovations implemented in Latin America during the last
decades have caught the attention of several scholars in both the Global North
and South because of their democratizing effects on inclusion and accountability
(Fung 2011; Peruzzotti 2012). Conversely, others have also stressed their
demobilizing effects (Greaves 2005; Koppelman 2017) and the ways they help
incorporate neoliberal ethics into the urban poor’s citizenship claims (Pérez
2017). This research study focuses on a usually-overlooked type of participatory
90 innovation—quotidian participatory mechanisms.
 Bensus: Improving local governance with citizen engagement?

QPMs are quotidian (i.e. mundane) in two senses. First, they work on a daily
or weekly basis, as opposed to other participatory innovations that are more
sporadic (e.g. participatory budgeting and town halls). Secondly, they address
routine urban problems (e.g. public safety and street cleaning) and they treat
as quotidian issues such as the effects of real estate dynamics. Despite their
differences, QPMs share three main characteristics: the search for efficient
solutions to quotidian problems, the use of information and communication
technologies, and the individualized treatment of common urban issues.
The rise of QPMs is particular in the context of how an entrepreneurial
type of urban management has been developed in Peru since the neoliberal
reforms of the early 1990s (Harvey 1989). The authoritarian government of
Alberto Fujimori (1990–2000) led the economic restructuring, among which
tax reforms were crucial for local governments. The taxation of local residents
and businesses, therefore, became one direct source of revenue for local
governments. This shift, however, has generated inequality across districts,
benefiting urban districts with a large concentration of taxable high-income
populations and businesses, and left the poorer districts more dependent on the
national government’s funding allocation (Barr and Dietz 2006).
In Peru, the local scale of government is the district, not the city. Each district—
there are fifty in Lima—has a local government, elected by popular vote since
1980. In 2003, the government of Alejandro Toledo implemented the Organic
Law of Municipalities, Law N° 27972. This law distributed various functions
to the local district-level government, including planning, street cleaning and
maintenance, audit functions, and citizen organization for participation.
The local governments’ generation of revenues took a different dynamic
during the real estate boom that started in 2006.4 In this context, district
municipalities started focusing on attracting real estate investment to increase
tax revenues. Together with state subsidies, different Peruvian governments
made construction permits flexible and reduced the time it took to get permits
as a means to incentivize economic growth. These policies, designed by the
national government, created new challenges for local governments on how
to deal with the rapidly shifting urban landscape and the increasing conflicts
between the demands of developers and residents.
Existing participatory mechanisms were not suited to deal with these new
challenges. For instance, the revocation of public authorities and referendums
requires gathering signatures from at least 25% of local voters (Remy 2011;
Calderón 2012). Another example is Participatory Budgeting, which became
a top-down national policy in 2003. This design affected both the citizenry’s
and the local authorities’ commitment to the process and excluded the
administrative reforms and communication channels present in more successful
models (Baiocchi 2005; Melgar 2014; Baiocchi and Ganuza 2014). Successive
governments further reformed Participatory Budgeting by increasing the
technical difficulties for project proposals and reducing participation to voting.
These reforms limited Participatory Budgeting’s efficacy as a space for citizen
proposal and deliberation (Remy 2011), while reinforcing the logic of non-
organized citizens as governance participants (Ganuza, Nez, and Morales 2014).
As Caldeira and Holston (2015) have argued, active citizen participation
is crucial for both neoliberalism and democracy. Participatory mechanisms 91
City 25–1–2

where individual citizens are the main subjects fit better the logic of neoliberal
governmentality because neoliberalism—as a mode of governmentality—“relies
on market knowledge and calculations for a politics of subjection and subject-
making” (Ong 2006, 13). Within this logic, individual active participation
becomes responsible for covering those services from which the state has
retreated (Rose 1999; Miraftab 2004a; Ong 2006).5
Critical perspectives on the implementation of participation in urban
governance have denounced them as a passive revolution strategy (Nash 2013;
Davies 2014). Top-down reforms give local governments discretion over what
demands are incorporated (Gray 2010), and who and what is included under the
scope of participation (Greaves 2005; Harwood 2007). Others have criticized
that traditional governance literature incorrectly assumes that more civic
participation leads to a decrease in state power (Blakeley 2010). Scholars have
also shown that participatory innovations help to engage middle-class citizens in
logics of urban governance (Ellis 2012) while opening space for them to impose
their values on other residents (Williams et al. 2018). In short, participatory
innovations increase the highly educated and time-flexible middle-class
residents’ influence on local government at the expense of the working class
and the urban poor (Ghertner 2011, 2012; Caldeira and Holston 2015).
However, these critical approaches tend to neglect the state’s coercive actions
(Davies 2014) as well as parallel democratization processes (Baiocchi and Ganuza
2017). They also fail to explain why and how some individuals and groups are
not entirely docile, dominated, or shaped by power (Pereyra 2011). This paper
contributes to these ongoing debates by analyzing the urban governance model
in which QPMs are incorporated. Furthermore, the paper analyzes how the
relationship between residents and local government is shaped by fostering
either a customer-citizenship logic or a patronage logic. I understand the
patronage logic as a result of routine face-to-face interactions between brokers
and clients who exchange access to services for (potential) political support
(Auyero and Benzecry 2017). In contrast, middle-class customer-citizens “claim
respectability [and access to services] based on taxpaying and ‘good’ citizenship”
(Lemanski and Tawa Lama-Rewal 2013, 98). To paraphrase Mills (1959), the
risk with these logics, I argue, is that public issues are addressed as personal
problems.

Quotidian participatory mechanisms in Lima

Miraflores and San Miguel are two middle-class districts located in the coastal
part of the high-rent central area of Lima (see Figure 1). They host some of the
larger employment, leisure, and educational metropolitan nodes (Chion 2002;
Gonzales and Del Pozo 2012; Vega Centeno et al. 2019). They differ, however,
in their social composition. While the local imaginary associates Miraflores’
residents with posh people or pitucos, San Miguel is more diverse with
wealthy neighborhoods facing the ocean, middle-class apartment projects, and
autoconstructed areas.
The concentration of nodes and their location within the metropolis made
92 them two of the most attractive districts for the construction of new apartments
 Bensus: Improving local governance with citizen engagement?

Figure 1: Locations of Miraflores and San Miguel within the Metropolitan Area of Lima. For the most part,
the central area has been formally urbanized as opposed to the autoconstructed barriadas in the peripheries
(Source: Author’s illustration).

(see Figure 2). Figure 2 provides the average number of new apartments built
by district between 2006 and 2016. Over this decade, construction in these two
districts was above the metropolitan average. Out of the more than 200,000
new apartments built in Lima during that period, Miraflores accounted for
9.3%, and San Miguel accounted for 9.1% of the total number. As a result of the
densities associated with the new developments, conflicts between residents,
developers, business owners, and municipalities arose. It is in this context that
some local governments implemented QPMs in order to ease and make more
efficient urban management, planning, and governance.

A case study of Miraflores and San Miguel

On the first Wednesday of 2011, the new Mayor of Miraflores, Jorge Muñoz,
started one of his campaign proposals: open neighborhood hearings, Governing
with the Resident. The hearings aimed to be inclusive and universal. Anybody
who lives, has a business or property in the district can attend (Municipalidad
de Miraflores 2011). This model was then replicated—with variations—by other
municipalities in Lima.6
Initially, all the visitors had hearings, live-streamed through the municipality’s
website, with the Mayor and high-ranking officials. The increasing number of
visitors led authorities to implement a second simultaneous type of hearings,
led by local government officials. The current form of the mechanism has
four stages: registration, waiting for service, the hearing, and, monitoring
and systematization. One of the most salient features of the hearings is that 93
City 25–1–2

Figure 2:  Annual numbers of new apartments built by district, 2006–2016 (Source: Cámara Peruana de la
Construcción (2006–2016)).

they are designed to give personalized attention to a resident or vecino; they

are not discussions open to a third party. Residents can engage in one-on-one
interactions with the Mayor or a specialized municipal official.
The Neighborhood Participation Department (NPD) is in charge of “keeping
a systematized record of the demands […] to channel the topics that will be
useful to generate statistical data that will be used for the establishment of the
objectives that shape the institutional management policies” (Municipalidad
de Miraflores 2011). This systematization changed in 2017 when the local
government implemented an intranet software that replaced the use of Excel
spreadsheets to monitor the progress of the cases and to facilitate communication
between departments.
San Miguel was one of the districts that implemented weekly hearings
following Miraflores’ experience. Over time, however, the work of community
participation promoters became the main channel for citizen participation and
communication between residents and the local government. In the early
2000s, former Mayor, Salvador Heresi, established the model in the district.
In 2015, Eduardo Bless, Heresi’s political successor, reorganized the promoters’
work by increasing the number of workers from eight to fifteen and by dividing
the district into eight different zones. Each promoter is in charge of making
daily rounds in a specific zone, although some zones have two promoters, and
some tasks demand the participation of larger groups of them.
San Miguel’s website describes the role of promoters as to “communicate
[the residents’] demands and give orientation to address them through
documents or with specific departments based on the subject of the demands”
(Municipalidad de San Miguel). From this description, the promoters’ work is
not immediately evident as a QPM. Furthermore, there is no legal document that
establishes the functions of promoters and the overall mechanism. Interviews
and observations highlighted, however, at least three main tasks through which
they induce different ways of participating. First, these promoters monitor the
94 condition of public spaces, including demands and suggestions from residents
 Bensus: Improving local governance with citizen engagement?

who approach them. Second, they inform residents of events organized by the
municipality (e.g. inaugurations and workshops). Finally, they apply surveys to
gather residents’ approval or disapproval of zoning changes and infrastructure
interventions.

Data and methods

This paper is based on four months of fieldwork in the districts of Miraflores
and San Miguel in Lima in 2017. It builds on previous research that analyzed the
conflicts between residents and local governments due to the new densities that
resulted from the real estate boom. The fieldwork for this paper also included
27 interviews with community leaders and residents who have experience
with these quotidian participatory mechanisms, as well as municipal officials
for both districts. I conducted ethnographic observations of both mechanisms
by walking with promoters in their daily rounds and by taking notes during
the Miraflores’ hearings held in municipal public areas. The systematization of
hearings in Miraflores allowed archival research about the topics and number
of hearings. I coded the hearings from 2011 to 2016—excluding cases in which
residents left before the hearing—based on the descriptions that the municipal
officials wrote in spreadsheets. I also analyzed the national and district laws
and ordinances, as well as urban development plans that each district uses for
participation, governance, and planning.
By juxtaposing these two cases, I explain how design and implementation
characteristics shape different ways in which residents and local officials interact
in participatory spaces. That is, the juxtaposition of dissimilar cases allows the
researcher to highlight their internal conditions by stressing their differences
and by aiming for variation as opposed to generalization (Caldeira 2017). The
following two sections explain, for each case, the disconnection between
planning and participation, and analyze how QPMs shape the relationship
between residents and local governments. Then, I analyze the similarities in
both cases and how they depoliticize civic engagement.

The “governing with the resident” model

Miraflores’ local government prioritizes residents’ involvement in quotidian

issues rather than in mid- and long-term planning. In doing so, the definition
of a resident becomes broader (i.e. it also includes developers and business
owners), and participation becomes individualized. Consequently, common
issues are relegated, and, when they appear, both citizens and municipal officials
treat them as private concerns. This section analyzes why hearings became the
main channel for participation and how they shape the relationship between
residents and the local government.

Urban planning and participation in Miraflores

Miraflores approved a new Urban Development Plan in 2017. The officials in
charge of the plan mentioned that they had not used the systematized information
from the weekly hearings for it. Instead, they conducted non-binding focus
groups with residents based on their profession (e.g. architects and sociologists), 95
City 25–1–2

and business owners to know their opinions about specific proposals. Moreover,
the community leaders I interviewed did not know about the planning process.
Like many other cities around the world (see Ellis 2012), Miraflores
implemented a series of policies to address new challenges, which focused on
the exclusiveness of living in the district. A high-ranking official explained how
Miraflores addresses the challenges that came along with the real estate boom:
“There are more buildings now […] For each building, we have to pick up more
trash, sweep the streets more often, have more safety because more people
are circulating in the streets. Thus, the municipality has to adapt its quality to
what the residents want.” Other policies focused on regulating construction
by creating requirements that ultimately made housing more expensive. For
instance, a new ordinance sets limits to the minimum square footage for
apartments and requires the construction of at least one in-building parking
spot for each apartment. In short, the municipality’s goal was to give an efficient
solution to residents’ demands while keeping attracting new developments and
taxpayers.7
In the face of the new challenges posed by construction and residents’
demands, mid and long-term plans became less relevant. The officials interviewed
mentioned that ordinances and annual operational guidelines were the most
important tools they use for their work. Nevertheless, participation has been
virtually absent during the elaboration of new ordinances. As the quote from
the high-ranking official suggests, everyday problems and demands are the
municipality’s priority now. Thus, as opposed to what Remy (2005) found, civic
engagement is exclusive and has been reduced to non-binding participation
for the elaboration of long-term plans, but it has become more critical for the
resolution of quotidian problems. It is in this context that the hearings have
become the main channel for participation, although they are disconnected
from planning.

Participating in public hearings

The entrepreneurial model of governance in Miraflores prioritizes the attraction
of investment and tax collection to provide services and efficient solutions to
resident demands. This is only one dimension of how neoliberal reforms have
shaped urban governance in Lima. There is another dimension related to how
citizen-state relationships forge a type of neoliberal citizenship. In studying
participation among the urban poor or pobladores in Chile, Pérez (2017) found
that neoliberal citizenship frames access to rights and services as something
people deserve because of their individual effort in participating. The weekly
hearings of Miraflores present another way in which neoliberal logics shape the
manifestation of urban citizenship. Upper- and middle-class residents demand
and perform their rights as customers.
First, it is essential to understand who falls under the category of “resident.”
Since the hearings aim to be inclusive and universal, the definition of “resident”
includes anybody who lives or has a property or business in the district, i.e.
taxpayers (Municipalidad de Miraflores 2011). As a result, a variety of actors—
with dissimilar relationships to the district—use the hearings for different
purposes, e.g. while community leaders try to influence urban management,
96 developers use the same channel to discuss project approvals.
 Bensus: Improving local governance with citizen engagement?

The waiting experience for the different stages of the hearing is a second
salient dimension of the customer-citizenship logic. Recent research on the
waiting of the urban poor in Latin American countries has highlighted the long
periods they usually face to receive services (Auyero 2011; Koppelman 2018).
Conversely, municipal officials from the NPD make an effort to keep the middle-
class residents’ waiting periods short.
The waiting time increases with the passing of the hours. Since the number
of officials is limited, and there are some highly demanded departments, some
residents have to wait between 30 and 45 min, which contrasts with the days
or years that the urban poor wait for services in Auyero’s and Koppelman’s
accounts. During my observations of the hearings, I witnessed a few cases in
which visitors complained vehemently about waiting for 40 min. In all these
cases, officials apologized and tried to calm down the person complaining. In a
few cases, the visitors even succeeded in getting faster assistance.
Other factors that affect the waiting time include a visitor’s familiarity
towards the municipal official who calls the list, or if the official knows the
resident’s case. In both cases, the official might use their discretion to skip turns.
As one official describes it, “There are some [residents] that always come, we
know them already. Others come and ask for the department. Some other times,
they come and describe the case to us, and we identify to what area [the cases]
correspond.” The officials decide, depending on the visitors’ description and
their local knowledge (Durose 2009), what departments should send officials to
help the visitors with their demands.8
As Lipsky ([1980] 2010) suggests, services organized on a first-come, first-
served logic—such as hearings—force clients to wait in a seemingly fair fashion.
This apparent fairness hides that waiting lists increase officials’ discretion on
calling people out of turn (Lipsky [1980] 2010). Furthermore, in contrast to
the urban poor, middle-class residents do not risk their access to services by
confronting officials and demanding faster assistance. The residents’ relationship
with the local government as customers, consequently, also informs how people
present demands.

“If I pay taxes, you can’t tell me ‘no’”

Given the definition of residents based on their condition as taxpayers, the
hearings have as diverse subjects as actors involved. Business owners and
developers have taken advantage of this mechanism to present problems related
to permits (48.4%) (see Table 1). Between 2012 and 2016, visits regarding
commercial permits and audits have been over a third of the total number of
hearings per year, and those related to construction permits have significantly
increased in the period observed. Hearings related to urban issues such as
transportation (e.g. traffic), conflicts between neighbors, and public safety have
decreased over the years, while those discussing planning topics have increased
but are only a small percentage of the total. Despite their decrease, urban issues
make up 35.7% of all cases between 2011 and 2016.
In other words, what is supposed to be a participatory space has been
mostly and increasingly used to address the local government’s audit function.
Moreover, because of the hearing’s design, the demands about urban issues are
usually presented as private problems, as the following example shows. 97
City 25–1–2

Table 1: Overall distribution of the topics discussed at public hearings from 2011 to 2016.

2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 Total

Commercial permits and audits 30.5 33.8 38.5 38.7 37.4 37.8 36.7
Construction permits 6.5 5.5 4.1 8.2 13.0 19.9 11.7
Public works 6.8 8.0 9.5 11.1 13.4 13.0 11.2
Taxes 10.4 8.4 7.6 6.9 6.8 6.0 7.2
Conflicts-constructions 5.7 9.0 7.2 7.5 4.2 3.3 5.5
Transportation 4.9 3.9 4.0 4.6 4.1 3.1 4.0
Conflicts-neighbors 2.6 5.3 7.8 4.2 3.5 2.7 3.9
Human development 7.1 6.1 3.8 3.5 3.1 3.0 3.9
Public safety 4.2 4.7 2.7 3.6 3.2 1.8 3.1
Urban Planning 1.3 1.2 1.5 2.4 2.4 2.5 2.1
Citizen Participation 2.5 1.7 2.0 2.1 1.6 2.1 2.0
Other 17.6 12.4 11.1 7.3 7.3 4.9 8.7
N of visitorsa 1871 1651 1906 2895 3744 4799 16,867
a
This number excludes people who left before the hearing. However, I included the main topics
discussed in the calculation of the proportions in this table. All numbers (except visitors) in the table
are percentages. Source: Own elaboration based on data from the NPD –Miraflores Municipality.

One morning, a young heterosexual couple complained about the noise on

their street, so they requested the constant presence of the local public safety
officials, Serenazgo, in the area. The response from the officials from the Audit,
Noise Control, and Transportation Departments was that their demand was
not possible to satisfy. The male resident responded vehemently, “You cannot
place somebody there? OK … the truth is that if I pay [taxes], you can’t tell me
that you are not able to provide the service to me.” Noticing that I was taking
notes, another official approached me and explained that the municipality could
not satisfy every complaint about nuisances. However, the official argued, the
presence of personnel from different departments showed the quality of the
municipality’s service. Apart from how legitimate or not the demand was,
this experience highlights two important features. First, for both officials and
visitors, the problem was a private one. Second, the residents demanded a
municipal service based on being taxpayers.
On a different day of observation, I joined a hearing in which two community
leaders were asking about the progress of a water infrastructure renewal
project. The official assisting them explained that bureaucratic obstacles from
the national government had caused delays. Then, she assured the community
leaders that work would start first in their neighborhoods. Although this was
one of the few hearings explicitly addressing common issues, the visitors used
the hearing to pressurize for the prioritization of their cases.
In sum, the design of the weekly hearings shapes the relationship between
residents and local governments, socializing the former as customer-citizens.
This situation has facilitated the prevalence of economic actors and, by excluding
spaces for deliberation, the mechanism limits the possibility of identifying
common issues. Finally, even when these common urban issues are discussed,
98 visitors can use them to favor their cases without debate.
 Bensus: Improving local governance with citizen engagement?

The “community participation promoters” model

Similar to Miraflores, San Miguel’s long-term planning processes are top-

down and non-binding. Unlike Miraflores, however, local ordinances are not
as crucial for regulating urban changes as national laws and zoning. This urban
management model prioritizes faster means for consultations about rapid urban
changes and facilitates ad hoc solutions. Community participation promoters
help with this endeavor through daily rounds in which they gather complaints,
demands, non-binding opinions. Moreover, they act as brokers of patronage
politics.

Planning and participation in San Miguel

In the early 2000s, former Mayor Salvador Heresi led a series of zoning
modifications and infrastructure improvements to make San Miguel more
attractive for real estate investment. His successor and political ally, Eduardo
Bless, continued the consolidation of this entrepreneurial model of governance.
As a consequence of this governance logic, some municipal officials informally
assumed the role of intermediaries—between property owners and renters—to
facilitate displacement for new developments (Bensús 2018).
Municipal officials highlighted that zoning and national legislation guide
their work. Among the latter, the Supreme Decree N° 011-2006 and Law N°
29090 (both for construction regulations) are their primary tools. Law N° 29090
is particularly relevant because national governments have modified it in order
to facilitate construction, reduce audit periods, and stimulate investment. Urban
development plans, consequently, were of marginal importance.
The salience of national legislation for urban management relegated the
importance of local citizen involvement. For instance, when describing the
planning process, a municipal official stated that:

The first step is gathering information. […] After we [the municipality] see what we
want to do, just then, we are going to start interviewing the residents. […] Because
if we don’t have a clear idea of what we kind of want, we won’t be able to tell the
resident [the vision for the district].

As this description shows, officials conceive planning as a top-down

process. Zoning changes, construction, and infrastructure works, however, do
require (non-binding) citizen opinions. It is in this context that the work of
the community participation promoters takes a primary role, as they facilitate
the communication from residents to officials and between different municipal
departments.

Participating from home

The community participation promoters are a particular case of street-level
bureaucrats (Lipsky [1980] 2010). As other examples of promoters in the
Peruvian case, they are the nexus between communities and government to
create clientelist relationships (Grompone 2004). Another characteristic is that
promoters are residents themselves, who inform other residents of events, how
to access services, and educate them on municipal ordinances. Since their work 99
City 25–1–2

requires them to make daily visits to neighborhoods, the residents’ engagement

with the local government is mostly performed from their houses.
In their daily rounds, promoters monitor the quality of the public space,
gather complaints and demands from residents, and visit community leaders.
The latter two functions are crucial, creating civic engagement that addresses
the routine problems that the municipality prioritizes. For instance, during one
daily round, a resident approached a promoter to tell her, “Do you work for the
municipality? We, on this block, have problems with a sidewalk that has been
damaged after a car accident, nobody has picked up the destroyed parts—it’s
a risk.” The promoter asked the resident to show her where the problem was
and to point to the damaged area. The promoter took a photo of her and later
explained to me that they are required to do so for accountability purposes.
A strategy that promoters have established is to do routine visits to
community leaders or residents that they have identified as key actors. In this
type of action, residents participate from home, as the visit’s purpose is to allow
them to present demands, complaints, or get information about the status of
their demands. When promoters do not visit, and residents want updates, they
can even call or text message the promoters, showing how institutionalized this
practice is.
Another important task of the promoters is to use surveys to learn more
about residents’ opinions on infrastructure projects or zoning changes before
and after they are implemented. It is an opportunity for residents to show their
approval or disapproval of specific interventions. Although non-binding, the
officials interviewed highlighted the importance of this task. An official from
the Private Projects Department explained that,

For example, for a zoning change, you are required to consult the residents. And they
[the promoters] are like “little ants” that are working on the street to see … how the
district is developing and what are the [residents’] needs, so we can generate policies
related to the residents’ comfort.

However, these surveys present two main limitations. First, participation

consists of giving individualized answers to yes/no questions, without
previously organized deliberation or binding effects. That is, this consultation
reduces participation to a level of tokenism (Arnstein 1969). The second
limitation is that the information gathered is not shared with the community.
In all these examples, the critical feature is the individualized face-to-face
relationship established between residents and promoters. For on the one hand,
it creates the channel to present mundane complaints that do not foster civic
engagement. On the other hand, cases that should constitute public issues (e.g.
public infrastructure) are treated as private problems (see Mills 1959).

“I have my own residents”

The daily rounds do not only atomize participation, but they also create
opportunities to establish and foster patronage relationships between the local
government and residents. As Auyero and Benzecry (2017) argue, patronage
exists and is sustained in quotidian face-to-face interactions maintained over
100 time. That is, the relationship between brokers and clients informs the latter’s
 Bensus: Improving local governance with citizen engagement?

dispositions and actions. Promoters, then, become brokers of patronage politics

by ensuring access to services and goods in exchange for support from residents.
On one of their daily rounds, an experienced promoter explained to me how
she establishes this type of relationship with residents—“I have my own residents,
whom I can count on when I need them. I spoil them on their birthdays or with
a cup of coffee. When there is the streaming of an event, I call them; not just to
make a bigger crowd, it’s not something bad, it’s so it can be seen [on television].”
Even though promoters inform of and motivate residents’ presence at events
organized by the municipality (e.g. workshops or inaugurations), the residents’
presence is encouraged as an apolitical crowd. Moreover, residents’ attendance
is based on the services they have or will receive.
It is also common that residents—especially community leaders—take
advantage of this type of relationship. On a different visit, I witnessed a resident
requesting that the local government send laborers to paint a wall in their parking
lots. After confirming that the municipality will send someone to do the work,
the promoter explained to me that the resident had been active in organizing his
neighbors in the past, so they were happy to help them back. In another example,
a leader from a middle-class community mentioned that, during the last three
years, her association had received donations for their Christmas celebrations.
Interestingly, the gifts started during Bless’s electoral campaign.
Each promoter keeps track of these demands and other issues in their zones
in different ways, but they do not systematize their work. This experience
challenges the assumption of the literature on governmentality that emphasizes
knowledge production as a sophisticated and technical procedure (Rose 1999).
This is not a significant issue, however, since the relationship between residents
and local government is designed to solve quotidian problems and to maintain
patronage relations, not to elaborate long-term plans.

Depoliticizing civic engagement and local participation

The previous two sections highlighted, by juxtaposition, how QPMs shape the
relationships between residents and their local governments differently. The
weekly hearings and the promoter’s daily rounds share, however, some features
worth exploring. They are examples of invited spaces9 (Miraftab 2004b) that
create individualized channels for participation. Consequently, they both
exclude spaces for deliberation and encounter that would foster the framing of
common issues and communal expectations about their districts’ future. That is,
they have a depoliticizing effect.
The main characteristic of the resident-municipality relationship is that it
excludes the political dimension of participation through different means.
This exclusion has happened, initially, through the shift from mid- and long-
term planning towards a new type of participation—namely, individualized,
with short waiting periods, and promoting new types of citizenship. First, in
Miraflores and San Miguel, the residents are told that they will not have to wait
for long periods; efficiency is the motto of QPMs. When middle-class residents
feel they have been waiting for too long, they can complain vehemently or call
and text municipal officials, without risking their access to services. 101
City 25–1–2

Second, these two QPMs facilitate the state’s role in mediating conflicts—
particularly avoiding them by excluding third parties. Even when the individual
presenting demands is a community representative, they usually present them
as private concerns, rather than as part of a coordinated civic action (Lichterman
and Eliasoph 2014). Through the atomization of participation, QPMs socialize
residents to participate as private individuals. Thus, the access to services is
mediated by residents being taxpayers or by the relationship of patronage they
have with the municipality.
The analysis of QPMs also challenges some common assumptions about
neoliberal governmentality and middle-classes’ participation. First, demands do
not always align with non-coercive neoliberal governmentality (Davies 2014).
In the hearings, a large percentage of demands related to the audit and safety
roles of the local government (see Table 1). In other words, they demand that the
state deploys its coercive functions to reproduce ideals of tranquility and order
in public spaces. Furthermore, some of the residents’ complaints are in tension
with the local government’s developmental goals. For instance, Table 1 shows
that, although decreasing over the years, hearings related to conflicts caused
by new constructions were the fifth more frequent topic in Miraflores. In an
example from San Miguel, a resident stated that “The cliff area is full of 20-story
buildings […] becom[ing] exclusive. People farther inland can’t see the ocean
anymore.” In sum, QPMs hardly help to reproduce the self-regulatory logic of
neoliberal governmentality (see Rose 1999; Ong 2006).
Regarding middle-class participation, scholars have argued that their demands
are informed by class aspirations and ideas of tranquility, order, and cleanliness
(Ghertner 2011; Ellis 2012). However, municipalities do not use the information
that QPMs produce for planning. Here the quotidian dimension of participation
and demand satisfaction becomes more relevant for the reproduction of middle-
class values and ideals of commodified urban development. Regarding this issue,
further research should analyze which factions of the middle class hegemonize
their interests (Fernandes and Heller 2006; Lemanski and Tawa Lama-Rewal
2013).10 The fact QPMs exclude spaces for deliberation and discussion about a
shared vision for the district makes explanations about middle-class hegemony
even more complex.
Finally, the direct and individualized relationship residents have with local
officials makes communal engagement seem unnecessary. As an official from
Miraflores describes it:

The distance between citizens and authorities has shortened, but the distance
between residents has increased. People don’t know who lives next to them anymore.
That’s why […] the atomization of [participation] has entailed the atomization of
collective rights performance.

Some residents echo this perspective. For instance, a community leader from
Miraflores told me about a woman who contacted her with concerns about
recent crimes that happened in their neighborhood. The community leader
interpreted this action as passive and inefficient. Therefore, in this and similar
situations, the community leader explained, she encourages her neighbors to
102 present their cases directly to the municipality.
 Bensus: Improving local governance with citizen engagement?

As the two cases discussed here show, local governments have implemented
a series of policy changes that reproduce some neoliberal logics. In a context
where attracting investment and taxpayers are the main municipal goals, QPMs
create efficiency for governance and shape the relationship between local
governments and residents. However, they have a different effect than cases in
which neoliberal governmentality fosters an individual’s moral engagement to a
community through participation (Rose 1999; Pérez 2017). The routine one-on-
one relationships that QPMs prioritize converges with the types of citizenships
they foment—associating service access to tax-paying or potential political
support. As a consequence, both residents and officials use them to treat urban
public issues as private problems. Without spaces for or intention to generate
communal civic engagement, participation is depoliticized.

Conclusions

In order to understand the different effects of QPMs on citizen engagement

in governance and planning, it is essential to situate them in a broader
socioeconomic context. Moreover, it is necessary to understand that neoliberal
reforms do not imply a complete cut of social services, but a focus on quotidian
and immediate needs (Von Schnitzler 2014). In that sense, the juxtaposition of
dissimilar cases highlights qualitative variations on how the parties involved
interact with each other through participatory mechanisms, as well as how
routine participation “socializes agents into arbitrary ways of understanding
political work” (Auyero and Benzecry 2017, 182).
The two cases discussed here show how the political and economic
dimensions of neoliberalism converge in urban governance. Local governments
need to attract investment and tax paying citizens, while still ensuring the
provision of some services to their residents. This task is complicated since
the dynamics of new construction and densification create new conflicts. As a
consequence, the managerial priorities of local governments have shifted from
mid- and long-term planning towards routine problem-solving. In this context,
QPMs allow local authorities to create ties with residents that facilitate conflict
resolution (or avoidance).
Established as one-on-one interactions, QPMs prevent the identification
and discussion of public urban issues. That is, they exclude what some authors
consider the critical political element of participation—deliberation (Fung and
Wright 2001). The definition of who is a resident for the weekly hearings in
Miraflores worsens this limitation since it allows developers and other people
with private interests to become dominant. In the case of San Miguel, the
consultations that promoters conduct remain tokenistic as far as the results are
neither shared nor discussed with the residents. Furthermore, promoters have
become an amalgam of political operators and personalized service providers.
The most detrimental consequence of the individualization of participation
is not, however, that different actors use these mechanisms for private problems.
As these cases show, the main risk is that phenomena that could and should
be discussed as urban public issues are treated as personal problems by both
officials and residents. By reproducing customer-citizen and patronage logics, 103
City 25–1–2

QPMs socialize residents into how to engage in governance, which can make
collective action and deliberation seem inefficient. The expansion of models
such as the weekly hearings to other lower-income districts of Lima (Cohaila
2016) and their promotion as an exemplary managerial practice call for further
research and critique.
Although the limitations for fostering political civic engagement are inherent
in the design of QPMs, they still present some opportunities. Groups and
individuals could take advantage of the existing active participation to channel
proposals critical of neoliberal governance and development, as in the examples
of civic governmentality discussed by Roy (2009). Furthermore, residents should
demand the systematization and socialization of the information gathered
through QPMs. This action would require the creation and reactivation of
deliberative spaces of participation for both governance and planning. In other
words, it is necessary to re-politicize everyday life through quotidian and
sporadic actions that help transform and subvert the current urbanization model.

Acknowledgements institutions, both enabling and challeng-

I would like to thank Van Tran, Teresa
Caldeira, Karen Chapple, James Holston, John
Mollenkopf, and the anonymous reviewers
for their helpful comments and suggestions
to earlier versions of this paper. I would also
like to thank Cody Melcher and the CUNY
Graduate Center Sociology Department’s
Urban Study Working group for their feedback.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported
by the author.
Funding
The fieldwork for this research was supported
by the Summer Research Fellowship from the
Department of City and Regional Planning, UC
Berkeley in 2017.
Notes
1 For simplicity, I will use Lima to refer to
the metropolitan area of Lima in this paper.
2 Governando con el vecino.
3 Promotoras de Participatión Vecinal.
4 The boom became possible through state
housing subsidies for the middle classes
through the Fondo Mi Vivienda (Calderón
2009).
5 Some authors have argued that gov-
ernmentality is not deployed by the
state exclusively. Roy (2009) coined
the concept of civic governmentality to
analyze how non-state organizations can
produce active citizens engaged in the
democratization of civil society and state
104
ing neoliberal institutions (Roy 2009;
Anwar 2012).
6 Cohaila (2016) analyzes how hearings on
San Martin de Porres and Los Olivos affect
institutional confidence. Weekly hear-
ings also exist in the districts of Rimac,
Chorrillos, and San Miguel.
7 In 2016, 84% of Miraflores residents paid
taxes on time, which is a high rate for Lima.
8 As Lipsky ([1980] 2010) and Durose (2009)
have argued, street-level bureaucrats
develop expert knowledge based on their
interpretation of rules, norms, and based
on their contextual experience. That is,
they do not follow fixed definitions or
mechanisms, but adapt to the existing ones
or develop new ones based on their own
informed experience.
9 As Lemanski and Tawa Lama-Rewal
(2013) have shown, the binary distinction
between invited (top-down) and invented
(bottom-up) spaces of participation is more
complex, and many mechanisms are the
result of a combination of both logics or
allow fluidity between them.
10 Pereyra (2016) has studied how time
becomes an important capital among
retirees in a neighborhood in Lima. Time,
scarce among younger residents, gives
them “organizational power” that they
translate into influence on local policies
and management.
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Viktor Bensus is a doctoral student in the
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Center. Email: vbensus@gradcenter.cuny.edu

107