The politics of participation in the Qhapaq Ñan Project: governmentality and heritage-making in Peru

This paper examines the power dynamics embedded in the participatory policy of the Qhapaq Ñan Project, a state-led heritage management programme in Peru, over the past two decades. Developed in the context of securing the Qhapaq Ñan’s inscription as a UNESCO World Heritage site – a transnational network of precolonial roads and associated sites – this study analyzes how participation functions as both a tool and a technique of governance. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of governmentality and Li’s notion of the ‘will to improve’, and grounded on a qualitative analysis of three monumental preservation programmes – Huaycán de Cieneguilla, Huánuco Pampa, and Aypate – this study demonstrates that participatory practices operate as a hybrid of sovereignty, disciplinary and governmental techniques. These practices are calibrated to engage local communities while simultaneously shaping and constraining the scope of their agency. Framed as an ethical commitment to ‘improve’ local conditions and heritage relations, participation opened spaces for negotiation, yet these were strictly circumscribed by legal, technical, and normative limits. Ultimately, the study shows that participatory approaches are subsumed within structural hierarchies shaped by dominant technical views of material preservation and development, thereby restricting local agency and reinforcing state control over relationships between society and the precolonial past.