Elsevier

Applied Geography

Volume 134, September 2021, 102519
Applied Geography

Pandemic response in rural Peru: Multi-scale institutional analysis of the COVID-19 crisis

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2021.102519Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Highlights

  • Peru suffered among the worst death rates from the COVID-19 pandemic, despite stringent response measures.

  • Institutional responses were fragmented and not coordinated across levels of government.

  • Rural governments faced unique challenges, including massive return migration from urban areas.

  • Rural institutional response was characterized by a mix of paralysis and improvisation.

Abstract

The first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic was devastating in Peru, which suffered a high death rate and severe economic disruption. These results occurred despite ambitious response measures, revealing widespread institutional weaknesses across the country's levels of government. We analyze responses across the four levels of government, with emphasis on local governance in rural areas, to understand how institutions and contexts shape crisis management outcomes. We focus on the Arequipa region, drawing from 44 interviews with officials and community members. We found that the crisis provoked a reversion to the norm across multiple scales, though with significant differentiation. The national government fell back on a centralized, militarized approach that effectively reclaimed power but was ineffective in confronting the pandemic. Counter the overarching recentralization trend, in rural peripheries where state power was always partial, norms of informal local governance were reinforced and intensified. The de facto autonomy in rural areas elicited a mix of paralysis and improvisation, with outcomes that varied widely from place to place and over time. These bifurcated results in the face of crisis reveal important weaknesses in Peru's governance structures and institutions and show how pre-existing habits and norms were reproduced in the face of crisis, rather than reformed or transcended.

Keywords

Institutions
Governance
Crisis
Pandemic
Peru

Cited by (0)