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Accountability in education was implemented to improve poor learning outcomes by documenting and monitoring learning achievement results. In this process, external standardized achievement tests have played a central role, being the mechanism most frequently used to measure learning outcomes. However, several decades after its initial implementation, most students are still below learning standards, especially in developing countries. Additionally, several issues have been documented when using standardized achievement tests for accountability purposes. This study contributes to the discussion regarding why implementing accountability systems has not been enough to ensure that all students meet learning objectives. Particularly, this research explored technical, ethical, and political issues derived from implementing accountability systems in K12 in Colombia and Chile that incorporate standardized achievement tests to understand how the issues affect the quality of the accountability systems and limit their expected benefits. Specifically, this paper addressed the following questions: how do, if any, technical and political issues related to the use of standardized achievement tests affect the quality of the accountability systems? How do political decisions exacerbate technical issues and affect the quality of accountability systems? Can technical and political issues also be considered ethical? If so, how can all of them be overcome? This study built on theories and contributions about accountability in the education sector through the 2014 edition of the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing developed by the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the American Psychological Association (APA), and the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME), as well as a literature review regarding pros and cons of implementing an accountability system in the three dimensions analyzed: technical, political and ethical. A multiple case study with a theory-guided qualitative content analysis approach were also used; and the documentation of the current accountability systems in Chile and Colombia, and the most recent change due to political decisions were mainly reviewed to answer the research questions. Regarding the first one, seven issues that negatively affect the Colombian and Chilean accountability systems were identified; these limit their potential benefits. Issue 1: There is no clear connection between the intended inferences and how test results are reported. Issue 2: There are test reports with incomplete descriptions. Issue 3: Measurement errors are omitted when reporting some test results. Issue 4: The unit of intended inference for test results is not defined clearly in the regulatory documentation. Issue 5: There are omissions of support when describing the way in which test results should be used given the intended inferences, uses and implications. Issue 6: There is no clear connection between documentation, indicating how each one responds or builds on the others. Issue 7: Current standardized achievement tests measure the national curriculum partially, but it is not stated explicitly. Finally, the way in which these uses affect the quality of the accountability systems analyzed is described. For the second research question, some mixed evidence was found. For Colombia, the most recent political decision generated additional technical pressure, exacerbating technical issues, while Chile could have reduced the technical pressure. For the third research question, the political and technical issues identified can be considered ethical given the evidence analyzed, and they can be overcome by following the international standards in testing, as the accountability systems already declare. However, there is enough information for a better implementation of accountability systems in both Chile and Colombia, so a discussion about the implications for the field and practice is reported. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

This paper depicts the results from a qualitative research study focused on finding out the effect of interaction through social media on the development of second language learners' written production from a private school in Medellín, Antioquia, Colombia. The study was framed within concepts such as "social interaction," "digital literacy," "content communities," and creation of identities in the online world, among others. Data was collected through a survey, an open-ended questionnaire, an interview to students, a teacher's journal, and assessment of students' artifacts. The analysis of the data was done through a Constant Comparison and categorization; results showed an increment in the development of learners' written production, as well as the disposition to socially interact in the written form. Appendices include: Questionnaire; Survey Questions; Evaluating the Activity Based on the Activities Done; and Screenshots.

Writing Studies has flourished as a field in Latin America during the last two decades. Its development has been fostered by an exponential growth of college enrollments and processes of expansion and democratization of the educational offer in the region. The renewed attention received by higher education writing has fueled new research efforts and teaching initiatives that have rapidly spread across the region, especially in some countries such as Argentina, Colombia and Chile. As the field has accumulated a growing body of research, some disciplinary inquiry has started to appear, mostly sponsored by the "Iniciativas de Lectura y Escritura en la Educacion Superior" (ILEES) international group, which has showed the coexistence of two approaches, one informed by linguistics and another closer to educational perspectives. However, examinations on the nature of the epistemologies, and consequently, on the ideologies of literacy of this emerging disciplinary space has not yet been conducted. Such a research is important in order to consolidate and expand research and teaching efforts, but also to reflect on and improve the community's definitions, goals and identities, which is a much needed step to join the international ongoing conversation about writing. This research constitutes a socio-rhetorically informed attempt to understand what this novel disciplinary configuration means in terms of intellectual work through the study of the writing it actually produces, for example through citations, rather than from an external approach. It draws from data from previous studies that have shown that intellectual influence is diverse and citation patterns sometimes seem to bring together seemingly conflicting epistemologies. Given its socio-rhetorical approach, this research is primarily concerned with the activity writing scholars engage in. As Russell posits, the writing of a community can only be understood in terms of the community's activities. Similarly, the nature of the disciplinary grouping these scholars represent is also understood in terms of communal activity and problem definition, that is, in the ways in which their writing shows efforts to communally define an object of study. Methods blend tools from Rhetoric of Science and Discourse Analysis in order to examine a sample constituted by nine articles from the three leading countries of the region, and sampling was made through the ILEES Survey, which assured ecological representativeness, as the participants identified themselves as writing scholars. The three research questions that guided the inquiry are: (1) What are the main interests, research problems and knowledge claims that can be found in this sample of papers? (2) What are the epistemologies and ideologies of literacy in the sample and how they get to be represented in the texts? (3) Do these epistemologies correspond to the two disciplinary spaces (i.e. linguistics and education) described in previous studies? Attention was paid to intertextual dynamics (including rhetorical uses and citation patterns), introductions and definition of research problems, theoretical apparatuses, and knowledge claims. Micro analytical tools included appraisal, subjectivity markers, hedging, and metadiscourse markers, among other ad-hoc linguistic-level tools. These tools were used to provide textual evidence for the interpretation of the epistemologies and ideologies of literacy of the field represented in the sample. Results show very interesting and differential patterns in the discourse construction of knowledge for all the variables analyzed, including epistemic introductions and communally definition of problems, intertextuality, positive and negative evaluation of sources, among others. There are also various indexes of communal activity which allow us to think of this grouping as an emergent disciplinary community, which exhibits high levels of hybridization, both by resorting to previously known traditions (inheritance) or by bringing together all the resources that might seem to be useful (synthesis). As for the research questions, (1) there is a varied array of topics in this sample, but they can mostly be characterized as text descriptions, pedagogy practices, and writing practices. (2) There are two broad ideologies that can be characterized. One, more centered in the textual dimension, and other, more diffuse, which is constructed around the study of practices but still lacks disciplinary compaction. (3) These ideologies correlate to the main two groupings that were previously detected, namely linguistics-driven and educational-driven. Disciplinary clustering also highly correlates with the different discursive features of knowledge-making strategies, including the kinds of introductions constructed, the uses of intertextuality, and the nature of the claims. Additionally, there is evidence of jurisdictional disputes, both in the research articles and in the interviews. In sum, whereas the field is currently growing and in a clear path towards consolidation, it would benefit from a more sound communal definition of problems as well as a more cooperative, interdisciplinary stance. In order to gain a voice and join international conversations of writing, Latin American Writing Studies need to go beyond the replication of northern models and advance a local, decolonial perspective to writing studies, paying attention to the historical and material needs and constraints of the region as well as to its own theoretical strengths. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

By examining the impact of the commitment problem between the FARC and the Colombian government, this paper seeks to answer the following question: What led the government and the FARC to finally agree to end the conflict through a peace accord? This research addresses a notable gap in the literature by examining the pivotal role of power-sharing arrangements and hierarchical structures on negotiation dynamics. I conducted in-depth interviews with public officials in Colombia, complemented by the utilization of secondary data. I aim to ascertain whether power-sharing arrangements mitigate the commitment problem and to advance our current understanding of whether rebel group/guerrilla structural hierarchies impact negotiation dynamics. Advisor: Courtney Hillebrecht

This dissertation is structured as three papers which seek to contribute to the increasing body of literature on three looming crises in Latin America, in topics identified as the core of public policy debates in the region for the upcoming decade. The first paper explores the relationship between levels of air pollution and safety incidents in Medellín, Colombia, during the period 2017-2019. Using an empirical strategy, I find a positive relationship between PM₂.₅ pollution levels and both property and violent daily incidents at the neighborhood level, after accounting for weather and location characteristics. These findings constitute a valuable tool for cost-benefit analysis of the environmental crisis in Colombia that uses an approach focused on its effects on safety that is currently absent in the conversation. In the second paper, on the crisis of chronic disease, using the Mexican Health and Aging Study 2018 we compare total out-of-pocket expenses for physician visits and medication among older adults living with diabetes in Mexico, stratified between urban, semi-urban, and rural localities. We find that although the healthcare safety net program (Seguro Popular) has improved access to care, older Mexicans affiliated with it have far higher out-of-pocket expenditures for medications than those on employer-based plans in all localities. Across all groups, the uninsured bear the highest burden of expenditures, highlighting continued need to address health inequities for the most underserved populations. Finally, the third paper on the rental markets’ crisis, follows the need to increase research on the availability of non-ownership alternatives in the region. It explores the effectiveness of an ease-of-eviction policy in Costa Rica by using household surveys to explore rental volumes before and after changes in regulation, while putting the country’s rental markets in broader perspective compared to OECD countries and their varying levels of eviction restrictions. The salience of these papers is greater today than ever, as Latin American countries face both present and looming policy crises on multiple fronts. Tackling these issues effectively will require a combination of public innovation, rigorous academic research, and interdisciplinary approaches to complex policy challenges.

This thesis is structured in seven chapters. Chapter one includes a brief introduction and presents a literature review that describes, summarises and analyses three different segments of literature I have taxonomised among a broad collection of research papers and books written by academics and policymakers referring to the role played by corporations, particularly MNCs, in the socio-economic development of the countries facing armed conflicts. It provides a clear indication of research gaps within and between these different sets of literature in order to elucidate the central contributions of this thesis. The second chapter develops a theoretical framework of state capture and its potential effects on conflict and is organised into six sections. The first section, explores different elements to shape a definition of state capture; section two elucidates the main actors involved in the state capture process when MNCs play the role of captor; the third section draws the attention to some legal mechanisms through which MNCs may configure socio-political networks facilitating their role as captors; the fourth section describes possible pathways through which state capture may occur; section five highlight factors encouraging MNCs to play the role of captor in societies in which systems of violence are entrenched, and finally, section six establishes a criterion to identify the impact of state capture on conflict. Chapter three introduces the Colombian case foreshadowing the case study chapters. The chapter outlines the role of the MNCs in the country dating back to early 20th century and it is used to frame a discussion of case selection, both at the level of the country case and of the cases used in the chapters that follow. The chapter also discusses the history of state capture using a reference to the origins of the Banana Republic and it leads up to a discussion of the persistence of corruption and violence over the decades that followed. Through chapters four to six, this thesis analyses three episodes (embedded sub-cases or sub-units of analysis) within the Colombian single-case study (holistic case), in which MNCs have engaged in attempts to influence and capture the state or have effectively influenced and captured the state impacting the Colombian conflict. This thesis analyses how these MNCs deployed their power to influence the public decisionmaking system in their private benefit through the employment of different mechanisms that worsened symptoms of structural violence such as the deprivation of people’s socio-political and environmental rights. Finally, based on the findings of my fieldwork, the final chapter summarises key points and makes some reflections on policy implications and other relevant issues in order to provide some recommendations to address state capture.

What motivates state, market, and civil society change agents to pursue the institutionalization of progressive planning practices, how do they do so, and why are they more or less effective in their pursuits? This dissertation, structured around three papers, uses interviews, focus groups, observation and documents to analyze how state and non-state actors in Medellin have sought to give progressive planning continuity. The first paper shows how the factors that account for institutionalization in weak institutional contexts must cover a range of eventualities, which I refer to as elements of institutionalization. Relations are needed to socialize a practice, create constituencies, mobilize interest, and provide enforcement. Practices reflect the public administration nature of state planning, thus highlighting the importance of reduced ambiguity, incentives to comply, resource allocation, and informational flows. Concepts help generate mental frameworks to cement the institution by providing justifications, substantiation, expectations, and influencing perception. Lastly, an acknowledgement of the importance of space is needed to target the appropriate scale, to ground concepts, to locate practices, and to situate relations. Identifying these elements provides a first contribution to the literature, and also evidences how fragile institutionalization efforts can be given the myriad of factors agents must attend to. The second paper shows that both state and non-state agents are aware of such fragility and thus attempt to create both formal and informal institutions. An analysis of the rationale for this pursuit and its mechanisms leads to the second contribution of this dissertation: the concept of institutional compounding. By impacting both formal and informal institutions, agents of change are better able to reduce the weaknesses associated with each; this however requires dynamically networking with individuals from at least one different societal category. As the elements and compounding contributions suggest, effectiveness in the pursuit of institutionalization is not easily assured. The third paper develops the argument that factors that enable experimentation or create critical junctures that allow new practices to emerge, such as decentralization, norm flexibility, and political initiative, can also represent impediments to institutionalization.

In recent decades, negotiated settlements between governments and rebel groups have become an increasingly common solution to civil wars. Yet negotiating agreements that can endure is difficult, and a number of countries have reached settlements only to see persistent or recurrent conflict. What are the threats or obstacles to peace in countries emerging from armed conflict? I study the case of Colombia, where a 2016 peace agreement ended a decades-long conflict with the FARC, Colombia's largest and oldest rebel group. Early on, the peace agreement was lauded as an enormous success, and won the country's president a Nobel Peace Prize. Yet within only a few years of the agreement’s ratification, dissident rebel factions that rejected peace had recaptured roughly half of their former territory, bringing a new wave of violence and instability. My dissertation is composed of three papers that address: (1) the causes of the rebel defection and origins of the FARC dissident factions; (2) the direct effects of the FARC dissident's defection on the peace agreement's implementation, and in particular the Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) program; and (3) the political effects of these setbacks on Colombian public’s support for the peace agreement.In the first chapter, I investigate the origins of conflict resurgence: why did FARC factions defect from the peace agreement and return to war? Drawing on literatures on rebel fragmentation, peace process spoilers, and material explanations for rebellion, I argue that these dissident commanders returned to arms to exploit opportunities to profit from drug production and trafficking that, ironically, were intensified by the partial success of the peace agreement. I show several lines of evidence for this argument. Among areas previously controlled by the FARC, those with cocaine production prior to the peace agreement were significantly more likely to see dissident factions emerge by 2020 than areas without significant production. Using soil and weather conditions to instrument for cocaine production produces similar results. Further, I use a novel measure of how critical each municipality is to drug trafficking to show that areas that are theoretically most important for drug trafficking are also more likely to see FARC resurgence. Finally, I theorize and find that competition over resources from rival armed groups weakens the relationship between cocaine production capacity and FARC resurgence. These results highlight an important challenge for peacebuilders: in conflicts characterized by resource competition, demobilizing a rebel group may have the unintended consequence of increasing the opportunities for profit for the group's competitors and defectors. In Chapter 2, I focus on the consequences of the FARC dissidents’ defection on the peace agreement’s implementation, and specifically, the threat it poses to Colombia’s Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) program. Since 2016, the former FARC combatants who demobilized have experienced a wave of violent attacks. Existing research on challenges to DDR typically focuses on proclivities for criminality among former combatants or stigmatization by civilians. I document a distinct challenge to DDR that I argue emerges when rebel groups factionalize over the decision to demobilize; namely, fratricide by rebel splinter groups that reject peace. I argue that the success of DDR threatens the interests of rebel splinter groups, and that violence against DDR participants is a strategic response to this threat. Using a difference-in-differences approach, I show that the emergence and expansion of FARC factions opposed to Colombia's 2016 peace agreement caused a surge in fatal attacks against DDR participants. I also provide qualitative evidence illustrating the mechanisms driving this pattern. These findings highlight the need for a distinct DDR model for rebel groups at risk of factionalization. Finally, Chapter 3 investigates how the defection of FARC dissidents has affected the Colombian public's support for the peace agreement. A longstanding conventional wisdom in the peacebuilding literature holds that violence during and after a peace process undermines public support for peace. Yet the empirical record is mixed, and in a few high-profile cases such as the Omagh bombing in Northern Ireland, public support for peace surged despite---or even in response to---incidents of violence. Building on the literature on public opinion formation, I argue that the effect of violence on attitudes towards peace may be moderated or exacerbated by political messaging about who or what is to blame. In Colombia, the peace agreement's political supporters and opponents offer competing messages that blame postconflict violence on either the government's implementation failures or on noncompliance by dissident rebel commanders. I fielded a survey experiment with 1466 respondents in conflict and non-conflict zones, pairing recent news about postconflict violence with information supporting these competing political messages. I find that messaging blaming rebel commanders for failing to comply reduced respondents' support for future peace negotiations, but I do not find strong evidence that blaming poor government implementation had a countervailing effect. While the treatment emphasizing rebel commanders' noncompliance increased perceptions that rebels alone were to blame, citizens responded to the treatment emphasizing government implementation failures by blaming both parties, limiting the moderating effect of this message. These results suggest that political messaging during episodes of postconflict violence can influence what citizens learn from these episodes about the viability of peace processes, but that there may be an asymmetry in citizens' propensity to assign blame that favors political opponents of peace.

This dissertation presents three papers exploring the nature of political participation in conflict and post-conflict settings, focusing on the issues of nationalization, militant groups, and sub-national democracy. The first paper contributes to the literature on post-conflict democratization by exploring a key dimension of party systems: nationalization. Using cross-national statistical analysis, the main insight is that the participation of former militants promotes nationalization. However, militant group participation after agreements actually limits it, due to the incentives for concentration offered by power-sharing institutions after territorial conflicts. This shines a light on the potentially negative effects of peace agreements. The second paper explains sub-national variation in the degree of former rebel group participation in Colombia during the 1990s. The theory and findings extend work in both long-standing traditions in comparative politics (the study of parties and electoral systems) and more recent developments in post-conflict studies (the promotion of democracy in the aftermath of civil war). An instrumental variables regression analysis suggests that the interaction between electoral rules and conflict-related violence drive rebel group participation. More specifically, increased district magnitude in conjunction with higher rebel violence is associated with more participation by these groups at the local level. Finally, the third paper analyzes the variation in local democracy in the context of civil conflict in Colombia. The key contribution of this paper is on the theory side: by understanding the relationship between national and local incumbents as one of potential collaboration under the threat of rebel violence and control, we can better explain the contrasts between national-level democracy and local-level nondemocratic regimes. This contrasts with the standard approach to sub-national limits to democracy, i.e. the "boundary control" model. Together, the three papers offer a nuanced view of how institutions work after civil conflict, and also have important implications for policy-making and democracy-promotion in post-conflict settings.

This paper probes the role of birders as agents of re-territorialization in post-conflict Colombia. The 2016 signing of the peace accord between the Colombian government and the FARC ended the longest-running civil conflict in the western hemisphere, and marked the beginning of the state’s territorial re-integration project. An unlikely group has been in the initial wave of this territorial re-taking: birders. Due to Colombia’s position as a hotbed of avian biodiversity, the relative inaccessibility to large swathes of its territory, and the unique drive to add species to their personal lists, birders have been aggressive first-responders to this territorial re-opening. While questions of re-territorialization often conjure Weberian images of the state, this paper explores the line between the state as the fundamental actor in re-territorialization and the non-state actors that do the work of territorialization for the state. It does so by focusing on birders as agents of state articulation through the ‘prosaic geographies of stateness’ (Painter 2006).

This thesis focuses on the representations and stereotypes of Afrocolombians in the press from 1970 to 1980. The two newspapers used in the study were El Tiempo, the widest circulated paper in the country with its publishing house in the capital, Bogotá, and El País, the most influential paper of the Pacific Coast hailing from the third-largest city in the country, Santiago de Cali. During the 1970s, Black social and political leaders were creating the first congresses focusing on racial discrimination, unequal opportunities, and cultural identifiers for which to promote in the country. However, the majority of Black presence in the press was of mainly how Afrocolombians used their body as athletes, dancers, musicians, and laborers/domestic help. Although the country was promoting mestizaje as its’ national identity, blackness had been largely stigmatized and/or ignored in general ideas of patrimony and citizenship. Therefore, this thesis will show the complexities of how Afrocolombians were represented in the press on a national and regional scale through the lens of el negro permitido: what is permissible or follows in line with historical notions of how blackness has been constructed by a White or Mestizo/a elite. The findings of this thesis mostly derive from image and text analysis of microfilms of El País and El Tiempo during the 1970s, building on comparative approaches which span many sectors of society and their perspectives and has its strength in clarifying some of the nuances to how racism is produced and understood in a Colombian context. This is significant in the sense that the central government was promoting the nation to be free of racism while reserving these acts of discrimination and inequity of power to the United States. This thesis will explain how racism, through el negro permitido operated, thrived, and continued to normalize Black subordination through a color-blind rhetoric.

Currently in Santander, Colombia, a contentious debate over the demarcation of a protective boundary of the Santurbán Páramo is underway. For the approximately 9000 páramo residents, the collateral effects of the outcome could result in dispossession of lands and livelihoods. This paper will argue that status quo Colombian territorial zoning, at the service of Canadian mining interests cast domestically as the principal 'locomotora' (driving force) of national development, allows different expressions of state and civil society actors to either bypass or use environmental protections as means of personal gain and/or capitalist expansion. Mobilizing under a discourse of conservation, down-stream urban residents have made important advances toward water sovereignty while livelihoods of rural upstream residents become more precarious. The central research question of this paper asks: What are feasible development alternatives to large-scale mining for páramo residents and by whom are they being authored? Using field participant interviews and field research to analyze the actors involved and overarching discourses evoked in the debate, I consider the ways that environmentalism collaborates with private capital. In this light, I then question how the ambiguous role of the state may not only limit, but also open opportunities for better outcomes for Santurbán Páramo residents. By examining the entry of the company X Oro into the páramo, this paper considers how the resultant protests by urban residents downstream have stigmatized rural residents near the mine operation. Using a cultural political economy approach, I will analyze the points at which state, civil society, and capital are colliding, reinforcing, and collaborating. I propose that a more productive way of understanding eventual outcomes and possibilities for Páramo residents considers that the central issues in the Santurbán Páramo debate not be viewed only as an arena for environmental protection, but rather a framework for environmental justice that takes full account of the socio-economic equity and access to opportunities for the people most affected. By using Jessop's Framework for transnational economic and social processes, I consider how different forms of private capital interact with state and civil society through social mobilization and environmentalism. My findings suggest ways that land-use planning driven by local actors and grounded in situated knowledge and regional/national land-equality movements could inform the process of participatory development authorship for páramo residents.