ABSTRACT
The chapter’s main argument is that the 21-page partial agreement reached on the CRR, which included concrete provisions on land access, territorial public goods, and family agriculture supports, was crucial in shifting Santos’s rural development policy toward a more distributive orientation and away from the status quo trajectory. The accord on rural development reform served the negotiating parties in Havana moving forward on to other agenda items in the peace talks. Defining ambitious and detailed distributive measures, such as the one aimed at allocating 3 million hectares of land to peasants, was essential in showing to the FARC’s leadership the government’s credible commitment to carrying out major reforms during the implementation phase and thus to incentivize their own commitment to laying down weapons as part of the negotiations. At the same time, from a policy perspective, due to its robustness, exceptional nature, comprehensive and specific content, the CRR also had a significant discursive and material effect. Unlike ordinary social or economic policy measures, the agreement’s provisions had special procedures of fulfillment and binding mechanisms, like the Implementation Framework Plan, that enticed new institutional arrangements. These provisions served to crystallize a distributive agenda that was underway and that carved space out of the neoliberal path set long beforehand. In order to develop this argument, the chapter starts with a general discussion of the agreement’s exceptional nature and robustness, followed by a more detailed assessment of the CRR’s comprehensiveness and specific measures. Then, it addresses the effects it had on policy by identifying the implementation mechanisms to which it led (legal, financial, institutional) and the sectoral changes it motivated.
