The Micro-foundations of Peace: Attitudes Towards the Implementation of Colombia's Peace Agreement in war-affected Regions

What explains public support for peace agreements, especially as implementation unfolds? It has been eight years since the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) reached a peace accord, among the most comprehensive and ambitious accords ever signed. How has the Colombian public in war-affected communities shifted their opinions about the agreement since its implementation began? We leverage a 12,000-individual panel survey on perceptions and attitudes towards the peace accord collected in 2019 and 2021, and an original municipal-level dataset on peace accord implementation activities beginning in 2016, to explore how actual peace agreement implementation over time relates to people's satisfaction with peace agreement implementation. We find that contrary to our expectations, implementation is not robustly associated with shifts in satisfaction with the implementation of the agreement. We disaggregate by type of project and find that some types of public goods are associated with either more or less satisfaction. We propose possible mechanisms to account for these heterogeneous effects, including intensity, targeting, attribution, corruption and responsiveness. The findings contribute to directions for future research and policymaking.