• Paola del Carpio, research coordinator at Red de Estudios para el Desarrollo, emphasized the importance of public-private collaboration to attain development.

Paola del Carpio, research coordinator at Red de Estudios para el Desarrollo, argued that the ultimate goal of closing gaps is citizen welfare. Decentralization is a means to this end and must be strengthened by enhancing public administration capacities.

“The goal is citizens and citizen welfare. If certain level of government is unable to manage a key process, then another level of government should see to it; it is not just a matter of decentralizing again. The aim is not decentralization; decentralization is a means to reach citizens,” she affirmed during her participation as a panelist at Rumbo a PERUMIN - Northern Macroregion Edition.

In this sense, Del Carpio noted that, to harness the enormous potential of formal mining’s contribution to the northern macroregion and direct it towards closing gaps, we should have a transversal vision of development that takes into account all the actors involved, as well as public-private coordination.

No doubt an interaction among companies, and national and subnational authorities is key to fostering gap closing; nevertheless, Del Carpio mentioned some challenges we need to face in order to achieve good results.

“There is a series of limitations when coordination involves the State. The State usually has multiple parallel objectives with different persons responsible for each of them. These people do not trust one another, which causes delays and deficient information delivery, among others. Additionally, there is a huge staff turnover,” he pointed out.

Given the precarious situation of our public institutions, the panelist at the event remarked that the decentralization and development process ends up depending more on the people temporarily holding a position of power than on the institutions.

Therefore, in order to overcome the challenges of a joint effort between the public and private sectors—which is necessary to implement projects for the citizens’ benefit—she suggested prioritizing the most impactful gaps, constantly reporting the projects’ data and progress, and planning the macroregional development agenda.

“The key is to plan better, without drastically changing priorities from one year to the next. Good planning should seek for the State itself to manage title clearance for certain properties in a timely manner, manage potential conflicts, and plan for solutions before problems arise,” said Del Carpio.