ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the ways in which the authorities have often responded to the development of new urban neighbourhoods by appropriating inhabitants' practices and initiatives into policy, and how these local organizations have gained political significance also in wider political discourses and strategies. People's participation in social organizations can illuminate questions of power both as institutional structures and as decentralized social relationships diffused through different spaces of interaction. The Asociación de Organizaciónes de Mujeres en Arequipa (ASOMA) organization has in this manner become a channel for the distribution of food and technical assistance in the neighbourhood. In addition to their participation in the programmes of the municipality and Programa Nacional de Asistencia Alimentaria (PRONAA), the women in ASOMA were also involved with a Belgian NGO called Taller. In their realization of projects in new urban neighbourhoods, that state and NGO agencies sometimes appeal to the inhabitants with reference to Andean traditions for communal work.
