Constructing Collective Capacities: Organizational Fortification of the Federations

The federation of Andean farmers are a mysterious amalgamation of intentions and destinies. They are classic examples of the organizational ambiguities: participation/ authority and autonomy/dependency. They are also an intermediary between micro and the macro, ayllu ancestral and the modern company. There are some who maintain that the federations have been created artificially to serve the interests as external agents. For others, they are instruments of representation and collective empowerment of marginalized groups.

The original idea was to study the direct and indirect influences of the external interventions in the development of the community with the hypothesis that many efforts of promotion of the organization farmer had positive and cumulative impacts, although the original programs - the Andean Mission where several of the agrarian DRIs2 and reforms were disappearing. Severe criticism has resulted. An important inspiration for us was the work of Hirschman on “social energy”. In his opinion, the collective capacity reappears in different contexts that extend beyond the life of the initial project.