Читать книгу Empresas en el Conflicto Armado : Aportes a la Construcción de la paz en Colombia - Mary Martin Beth - Страница 40

In 2016, Colombia invited the private sector to co-operate in implementing a peace agreement via a mixture of legislative and non-legislative incentives, public policy instruments, and new institutions. These initiatives, in addition to rhetorically encouraging business to consider itself part of the peace process, provided openings for private sector involvement. A key theme of the process was the idea of ‘territorial peace’ (paz territorial): extending governance to areas of the country that had been most affected by the conflict and under the sway of armed groups carrying out illicit activities. The peace process aimed to increase legal livelihoods and generate new forms of income for the population, thereby reintegrating groups that had been outlawed or marginalised as a result of the conflict into local economies.

The government introduced territorial administrative structures including PDETS (proyectos de desarrollo con enfoque territorial), Zomac (zonas más afectadas por el conflicto), and Zonas Futuro, creating destinations for investment and the provision of new services. The government also offered tax breaks and seed funding to both create focal points for corporate interventions and stimulate dialogues between companies and local populations.

Infrastructure investment was seen as particularly critical for re-establishing the rule of law and fomenting new economic activities and markets. A key initiative in this regard has been the Obras por Impuestos (OPI), a tax payment mechanism allowing big companies to directly undertake development projects in Zomac municipalities partly in exchange for tax liabilities¹⁴. Eligible projects are related to the provision of water, energy, public health, public education, construction, or road infrastructure. In 2017, the first year of the scheme, 30 companies took part.

Business and peace have historically been a controversial issue in Colombia. In this country, there are strong links between the conflict and the commercial private sector, but also between the prospects for peace and corporate activities. Indeed, companies rallied behind peace process, professing that Colombia was going through a historic moment, and that there would be unique opportunity to rebuild the country and its economy. These companies were prepared to ‘bet on development’ by addressing issues such as poverty, inequality, and corruption, and envisage themselves as active participants in a process of national transformation. This led to them taking on direct and indirect peacebuilding tasks, acting individually, through business associations and Foundations, via sectoral initiatives or in partnerships with actors in civil society and government.

For example, the Asociación Nacional de Empresarios de Colombia (ANDI), Colombia’s leading business association, decided it needed to play an active role for Havana accords to succeed. The Asociación’s strategy identifies two key challenges: the need to provide quality public goods and the inclusion of vulnerable populations in the market economy through active interventions in employment practices, and supply chain organization, as well as purchasing and distribution practices. The first challenge is seen primarily as a government responsibility, while the second is an initiative which private companies could push. ANDI’s foundation worked with 150 companies on the strategy and noticed a shift from traditional philanthropy to a more instrumental attitude towards social investment in which companies see value in targeting social goals.

A proliferation of development and community projects across productive and service sectors is further evidence of companies directly contributing to peace and rural development. While many commitments predate the 2016 accord, and the rhetoric of national reconstruction has allowed the private sector to label what many business actors had been doing for some time as ‘peace initiatives’, two novel features stand out in this period. The type of commitment companies has initiated responds directly to policy instruments that sought to position the private sector as a key source of financing implementation of the peace process. The government’s Obras por Impuestos programme, for instance, encouraged the private sector to contemplate projects which it had not previously considered. A typical OPI project is constructing an access road to improve connectivity to isolated rural villages. In many cases, companies have paired roadbuilding projects with other initiatives to help communities build capacity and access to markets.

A second novel feature is the emphasis on rural development and targeting of areas most affected by the violence. The ambition to deliver a ‘territorial peace’ has been significant in determining where the private sector engages. The government identified the districts and municipalities that would receive public funds and initiated a planning process to kickstart rural development. This created new geographies of corporate engagement with these communities, opening up new locations for social and commercial investment while generating more intense interactions between communities and companies and other stakeholders in local government and civil society. Companies which had previously mainly targeted their social programmes on urban areas have since expanded them to rural areas. A notable example has been large extractives companies that operate in remote locations investigating the delivery of basic goods such as clean water and roads to improve community life.

Increased involvement with local populations has led these companies to undertake more indirect contributions to the peace process, such as assuming the role of facilitators of dialogues between different social groups. Businesses can deploy their convening power to bring diverse stakeholders to the table while also acting to build local capacities for reconciliation, development, and governance. The range of indirect functions and roles includes knowledge creation and sharing. Companies are aware that they possess information, skills, and lessons gleaned from past history of working with development initiatives. They are bringing this experience into the post-conflict environment in an explicit and systematic way, influencing public conversations about peace and peacebuilding. Companies keen to raise the visibility of their social investments have emphasised the need to share lessons from operating locally as they sought to influence the discourse of territorial peace. When questioned about their attitudes to the peace process, many stressed their aim to bring about improvements in public policy and governance capacities, as well as direct interventions.

A key feature of corporate engagement in the Colombian peace process is the creation of alliances and partnerships with both government bodies and civil society groups. Business associations and sectoral alliances are important platforms for large and small members. At the local level, companies believe that partnerships serve to maximise the strategic impact of their social investments and allow them to mobilise networks of entrepreneurs to reinforce the work of public bodies and NGOs. Collective action is seen as creating critical mass and helping business to marshal knowledge, logistics, and investment across multiple actors to plug gaps in knowledge and capacity between urban elites, and rural and semi-rural communities. In the words of one interviewee: ‘Our social offer is not only what we know and our experience. It is also in rigorous and well-designed projects. We have know-how on specific issues, we also know how to make alliances’¹⁵.

Issues such as health and education, which are seen as less politically contentious, have seen a high level of engagement, but foundations in particular are also prepared to pursue goals and methods which are seen as unpopular or difficult, such as mental health. One foundation champions the use of yoga to improve mental well-being, a priority on which it believes government actors could not focus. Capacity building, whether directly linked to the peace process or not, is also seen as a long-term contribution that affects the overall quality of life rather than a defined peacebuilding target. A typical comment was: ‘If you look back at how charity was done in Colombia, we have had a transition from assistance to developing projects for specific goals. Now we are trying to put them together in a system model that works in gaps such as in education, health, and infrastructure’¹⁶.

A key trope evident among larger companies is working with vulnerable populations: victims, displaced people, marginalised groups in society such as women, indigenous people, young people, disabled people, and former guerrilla fighters¹⁷. While this focus on citizens who have been most affected by the conflict aligns with government policy, it also reflects an explicit attempt to make provisions for citizens who are currently non-productive and not part of any workforce, and who have hitherto been outside of government programmes.

Foundation representatives in particular have spoken of focusing interventions on building capacity among marginalised groups, such as the homeless, as well as disabled, women, and young people, because they are relatively under-represented in the government discourse about rebuilding a productive economy¹⁸. Consultants also speak of a ‘more sophisticated strategy’ by companies in rural areas, where firms are prepared to be more proactive and responsive to local needs, partly to improve their ‘licence to operate’ and operational profitability, and also because they see it as improving their record of social impact and achievement of sustainability goals¹⁹.

As well as filling gaps in public provision, the private sector increasingly acts as a quality control enforcer for government programmes. For example, the Corona Foundation has established a programme that evaluates the quality of urban life and monitors the results of government planning policies²⁰.

Social impact investing has gained more visibility and become overlaid with a patriotic veneer of peacebuilding, thus transforming it from a marginal to a mainstream activity among larger businesses. Extractive and energy companies from the state-owned Ecopetrol to miners such as Drummond, Cerrejón, and the international conglomerate Cemex, are examples of companies that are focusing more intensively on social investment strategies and local community engagement.