The rural roads program, overseen byProvias Descentralizado (subdivision of Peru's Ministryof Transportation and Communications), began in 1995, andhas received funds from the Peruvian Government, the WorldBank and the Inter-American Development Bank. It is anational program for the rehabilitation and maintenance ofroads that link rural communities and villages withsecondary and principal roads, and through these, with townsand cities of the interior, thus expanding Peru's roadnetwork to the rural village level, especially in regionswith greater levels of poverty. In its twelve years ofexistence, the program has been evaluated several times interms of its impact on the economy (income levels, marketdynamics), on gender equity, on the culture of the highAndes, on access to basic roads, and on rural livingconditions (access to education, health, etc.). However, noeffort had been made to systematically understand itsimpacts on democracy and the quality of citizenshipexercised in rural areas. The study that is presented here,commissioned by the World Bank in February 2007, has soughtto analyze PCR's impacts, using two general hypothesesthat make it possible to explore the relationships betweenpublic roads and democracy. The first suggests that roadintegration, particularly the rehabilitation and maintenanceof roads that link rural villages with district orprovincial capitals, decreases the costs of democraticparticipation. In a context of increasing participatorysupply, due to the ongoing recurrence of national andmunicipal electoral processes, as well as to the creation ofnew rights of participation, new roads allow rural residentsto take part in democratic decision making processes withouthaving to incur significantly higher costs than those ofresidents of urban centers. The second hypothesis is morespecific to the Peru Rural Roads Program (PCR, for itsSpanish acronym); it suggests that the way in which theprogram operates, its institutional arrangements and theinstitutions to which it provides its services, strengthensdemocracy, and local civil society, strengthens new leaders,improves local management skills, and aids in politicalinclusion, particularly that of more vulnerable sectors.
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