Institutional redesign to close the residual telecommunications gap in Peru: The third channel of intervention for the emergence of sustainable community networks

Abstract

The problem of the lack of connectivity in a large part of the world has been further exposed due to the pandemic COVID-19; particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean, including in Peru. We have witnessed the lack of Internet access limits the conditions of development and widens the social and economic gaps among the people connected in urban areas and those who are not connected in rural areas. This problem has a multidimensional nature and arises from several underlying and structural causes that have been widely diagnosed so far. In this regard, this paper is focused on Peru, but it is potentially applicable to Latin America and the Caribbean. The new contribution is the definition of the residual gap of rural telecommunications (“residual gap”), understood as the group of localities that are not either prioritized or to be prioritized by the private sector or the traditional public interventions in the short and medium term. Likewise, we have analyzed the effectiveness of the current institutional design to deal with the connectivity gap and have proposed the incorporation of a third channel for the whole “residual gap”: a model of bottom-up governance for the emergency of sustainable community networks. According to its characteristics, this third channel demands the reconfiguration of the roles in the different social classes and enables the inclusion of territoriality and interculturality approaches in a wide range of geographical spaces. Finally, even though the localities that are part of the residual gap are characterized by a range of adverse conditions for the provision of traditional telecommunication services or others, for the rural Peruvian case, a great residual gap has a huge community network, beyond telecommunications (e.g. rural communities, indigenous populations, water and irrigation associations, etc.). This previous condition is a great advantage for the successful application of the model of community networks proposed in the institutional redesign. Its identification of opportunities is the third contribution of this paper.