Affirmative actions or transformative interventions for rural poverty reduction in Colombia? Dilemmas and opportunities

In Colombia, one of the critical challenges for poverty reduction is to deal with the consequences of the armed conflict. This conflict has left millions of internally displaced people who have received preferential treatment in social policies as a result of the Constitutional Court intervention. In 2016, the Government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army signed a Peace Agreement seeking to adjust public policies to ad-dress and correct the reasons that led to the armed conflict and its effects, establishing as one of the strategies the Development Programmes with Territorial Based-Focus in the 170 most-affected municipalities of the country. Guided by Human Rights-Based Approach and Social Justice theories and through the application of mixed-method research, this study indicates that the existing preferential provisioning for victims of internal displacement in poverty reduction policies has the potential to undermine the goals of poverty reduction formulated in the municipalities prioritised in the Peace Agreement. The data analysed shows that in these municipalities, population victim and non-victim have similar characteristics in socioeconomic conditions and the people do not demand preferential treatment to particular groups. The reason for the IDP’s preferential treatment, like affirmative action, imposes a division of groups for access to social provisioning, generating unintended effects of misrecognition and different levels of commitment in rights’ protection and consequently different types of right-holders. The study suggests that in the context of post-conflict the Development Programmes with Territorial Based-Focus could be considered a transformative solution for societal injustices.