ABSTRACT
This chapter takes up the question of the puzzling ambiguous outcome of Colombia’s recent rural development policy in the context of the peace talks. While many of the policy’s difficulties have to do with on-the-ground interventions and implementation schemes that the Santos and later Iván Duque governments carried out, the political circumstances, institutional arrangements, and policy decisions made early in Santos’s administration are also very relevant to understand the limited results of the CRR. The explanation I develop aims to disentangle a critical double puzzle: What accounts for Santos’s unexpected pro-poor shift in rural policy—crystallized in the CRR—whereby issues like land distribution, agricultural supports to the peasantry, and rural public goods occupied the forefront of the agenda? Second, why did this shift, despite its own high expectations, not translate into a significant change, but has emerged as rather limited and weak in practice? There are various forces at play that help to explain these questions, including long-term economic trends and interests, political constraints, policy decisions, and the peace agreement’s binding mechanisms. The theoretical framework developed in this chapter seeks to account for concepts and factors interacting on different analytical levels in order to understand the drivers for rural policy change in contexts of negotiated transitions.
