Are Collective Reparations Transitional or Transformational? Evidence from Peru

• In Event: Transitional Justice and Post-Conflict Repair

Abstract

Collective reparations have become a critical mechanism for helping post-conflict societies rebuild, establish democratic governance, and create the foundations for sustainable peace. Yet experimental or quasi-experimental evidence of the causal impact of this transitional justice mechanism is non-existent. This study uses a fuzzy regression discontinuity (fRD) design to contribute the first known large-scale evidence of the causal impact a collective reparations program. Between 2007 and 2017, Peru implemented collective reparations, consisting of a modest livelihood or infrastructure project, in 2,422 out of 5,713 registered communities. Since treatment prioritization was based on a victimization index, a viable design was found in communities located in four departments surrounding the department of Ayacucho, the epicenter of the violence. Matched government census and poverty targeting databases from 2012 and 2017 enabled tracking of households and individuals. Results indicate that the collective reparations had a significant impact on communities but in unexpected ways. While treated communities benefited more from the extension of new government social protection programs, they also experienced around 25% more out-migration, suggesting unintended consequences from policy feedback between collective reparations and social protection programs. To explore mechanisms, hypotheses for explaining increased out-migration were explored. While it was hypothesized that the out-migration was explained by the cash transfer's relaxation of liquidity constraints, the opposite was found. The conditional nature of the transfers reduced out-migration of women. Subsequent analysis suggests that the collective reparations' impact on out-migration resulted from greater market and information articulation with smaller and more remote communities, thus fulfilling one of the policy's objectives of social inclusion of poor communities yet at the price of accelerating the dissolution of the same communities. These results provide innumerable insights for the future design of collective reparations programs.

Author

• Matthew D Bird, Universidad del Pacifico