“Institutional memory should not remain with individuals, but with the institution”

I am going to broaden the subject a little because it is useful to understand what normally happens. We need to make some fairly clear distinctions. The rules establish a formal legislative agenda, a prioritised list that is updated every year and serves to guide and build agreement among the different parliamentary groups. The problem is that compliance is difficult to measure because it does not always come with verifiable objectives. It remains a large list of things people would like to do, so broad that its scope cannot ultimately be measured.

There is another agenda that is not written down and that I call the effective agenda. It is the real, day to day agenda. It is shaped by public urgency, current events, parliamentary oversight of officials and the priorities assigned by committees. This happens in every congress, not only in Peru. This agenda, which has not been agreed in advance, sets the direction of the legislative year. It does not necessarily connect with a long term view, state policies, budget capacity, or implementation by regional and local governments.

For the assignment of proposals, the rules say that the vice presidency in charge evaluates the type of proposal and refers it to the specialised committee according to its characteristics. I believe the written rule is essential because it establishes powers, stages, deadlines and safeguards. It gives the procedure legitimacy and makes it possible to know who decides, how decisions are made and what controls apply.

But the procedure is also surrounded by technical review, dialogue and coordination. A committee needs to understand the background, request opinions, compare the proposal with sector policy, speak with the bodies that will later regulate or apply it, and create opportunities for citizens and companies to participate. That coordination should not be seen as irregular or exceptional. It is precisely what should happen when the aim is to make a law work.

A legislator may have a proposal with a legitimate purpose and be convinced that it addresses a real problem, and I do not doubt those good intentions, but the issue often requires specialised knowledge. As you move forward, environmental, contractual, budgetary or regulatory problems arise. The fate of a law is therefore decided not only by its text or the rules, but by its technical basis, interinstitutional coordination and the ability to build agreements. A legislative agenda may identify an issue as important, but implementation will be difficult if those elements are missing.

The rules have not changed in this regard, regardless of the fact that Congress was unicameral until a few months ago and is now bicameral. Congress is divided into two structures: the Parliamentary Organisation, which includes trusted staff who arrive and leave with each member of Congress, and the Parliamentary Service, the professional staff that provides technical continuity. People may remain in those positions for ten, fifteen or twenty years and become an element of institutional memory.

This creates an important combination. The democratic renewal produced by the election of new legislators must coexist with an institutional memory that preserves procedures, precedents and accumulated experience. New advisers who do not yet understand the institution’s internal dynamics often arrive with every new member of Congress. They can contribute greatly by bringing fresh air to the debate, but they face a learning curve that is not short because the work inside is highly specialised. There is also pressure to submit legislative initiatives, which at times looks like a race to see who can produce the most.

The Parliamentary Service consists mainly of career professionals. They often remain for many years and do not depend on members of Congress arriving or leaving. The situation is different for trusted staff. Some advisers, though not all, are rehired after working for another legislator because they understand parliamentary procedures, and that knowledge helps to draft rules. There is a counterweight between the two teams, and their cooperation is most visible in committees. An incoming proposal is evaluated there and presented to the chair, who may submit it to committee members for approval as a report. The fact that these people have worked there for many years does not mean that they think alike. What they share is knowledge of the procedure. What can sometimes be missing, and only in certain cases, is expertise in the specific subject under discussion. That is why opinions are requested from experts and the sectors responsible for the issue.

That is why I think institutional memory must be preserved, but it should not remain with individuals; it should remain with the institution as a large repository. Complete files, traceability of changes, criteria and documentation. With artificial intelligence and other tools, those repositories can now save many hours of work and allow several steps forward instead of repeating the same work. People sometimes believe that everything returns to zero when a new parliamentary term begins, as though no debates had taken place in previous years. A great deal is lost there.

What I do believe has been seriously neglected is interinstitutional coordination. If you genuinely want to enrich the work, it matters less whether a professional has internal parliamentary experience. What matters is the knowledge they bring from outside. Legislative output is ultimately legitimised by a willingness, which every congress in the world should have, to coordinate with the actors directly or indirectly involved.

For me, regulatory stability does not mean freezing the rules or preventing the state from improving them. It means providing predictability, ensuring changes have a sound basis, assessing them in advance and setting clear transition rules.

Public private partnerships are a good example because those contracts may last several decades and should not depend on the wishes of the government or official that initiated them. Their first source of legal stability is that the project responds to a previously planned public need, a sector policy and a technical assessment that different administrations can understand and sustain. That is the only way to create predictability and ensure that later changes are understood as improvements rather than measures that harm the project.

The second source is coordination among Congress, the Executive Branch and the regulator, and depending on the project, regional and local governments as well. Everyone must understand the problem the partnership is intended to solve. For a thirty year project, the questions are: what problem does it solve, what risks exist and what effect would a regulatory change have? Highly specialised matters require early coordination so that a decision that is reasonable from one perspective does not create difficulties from another. Congress can help strengthen that framework and remove obstacles while exercising responsible oversight. That does not deprive future changes of legitimacy.

If a rule must change, the stage of the project at which it changes matters greatly. During formulation or structuring, it may require updates to studies that used public resources and technical time, and a review of risk allocation. During the transaction, it may change competition or financing conditions. During contract performance, it may affect costs or obligations and create domestic or international disputes over commitments already made, which are resolved through the mechanisms established in the contract. Regulatory stability is not rigid, but it must result from planning and coordination and respond to a clearly identified public need.

Investors measure it. When potential investors begin exploring the scope of these projects, they have already conducted a country risk assessment and reviewed long term behaviour. They have the concerns any investor would have about political and short term volatility. How do you invest in a country in turmoil? They also tend to obtain financing from international banks, which means repaying a loan every month, so they need to be confident that the project will have a certain degree of stability. I say a certain degree because unforeseen events occur in day to day operations and in contracts.

Concession agreements seek to provide that reassurance. They help distribute risks and establish mechanisms for responding to certain changes because the state itself approved those rules, regardless of the administration in office. But a contract does not freeze the legal system or exempt the concessionaire from complying with applicable law. If a regulatory change significantly alters the project’s economic or financial balance, the mechanisms for restoring balance, compensation or dispute resolution should be activated in accordance with the contract. Even then, projects are not free of problems. Another rule may appear that affects their territory, and a solution will have to be found.

It goes back to the effective agenda, the sense of urgency and current events. These are fragmented initiatives intended to change or repeal, within a very narrow scope, something believed not to be working or to have caused an imbalance. Most of them amend or repeal specific provisions connected to an urgency identified by the public or by legislators, without necessarily connecting them to the system as a whole.

Take land regulation. You may change a particular rule, but you need to ask how it affects investment in other sectors, the local ecosystem, formalisation and other activities. You are changing an article, repealing it or reinstating a provision that existed in the past, but regulatory impact assessment is invoked without always being carried out in practice.

The question is: what effect are you going to cause? At a basic level, it is an amendment. At the system level, it may affect people’s right to obtain title or stop investments that were not considered when the problem was defined, because the explanatory statement describes only the specific problem that the legislator identified with good intentions.

This is not exclusive to Congress. It is a challenge that affects the state as a whole and every level of government. A project may be promoted in one territory without speaking to other sectors that also operate there, creating a risk of duplicating work or losing traceability. This is not due to a lack of willingness, but to the absence of a comprehensive view of the system. Sometimes people see the tree but not the forest. That is where the problem appears: the effect may not be the one intended, or the measure may achieve its sponsor’s purpose while affecting actors who had not been identified.

We need to be precise because these are two different things. There may be many proposals. Declaratory proposals have limited legal effects. They operate as a means for Congress to make an exhortation, mainly for expressive purposes. Even so, they must be processed and create work, so their volume should not be allowed to congest the agenda.

What the unicameral Congress lacked, and what I believe was part of the problem bicameralism seeks to avoid, was a period for reflection. The rules established that once a proposal had passed its first vote, at least seven days had to pass before the second. That period performed the role of a second chamber within the same body. It gave members a week to reflect, especially because the heat of debate can lead to the inclusion of provisions that were not reviewed by sector specialists or consulted organisations and therefore lack a full technical basis.

What happened in practice? If you review the videos, you would hear the committee chair say, almost word for word, “Mr President, I request that the second vote on this committee report be waived.” That removed the period for reflection. The proposal went to one vote and was approved immediately. This is where the high output came from. It was not a high number of proposals, but a high number of laws. There may be two hundred legislative proposals, but the question is how many laws emerge.

That is why I believe a second chamber should mean fewer laws. A second stage creates another opportunity for deliberation and review and may encourage greater reflection, although it does not by itself guarantee a higher standard of quality. What is approved will reflect political agreement among parliamentary groups and the direction of events in the country. The volume of bills submitted will not decrease because legislators need to show that they are acting. What should decrease is the number of laws that are ultimately approved and published.

A machine can collect information from official sources, transcribe sessions, organise files, compare versions and record dates, votes and authors in very little time. Judgement begins when someone must determine what that information means: whether a change is substantive or merely procedural, the real likelihood that an initiative will advance, who it may affect and what uncertainty remains. Experience inside Congress helps identify precedents and signals that are not always visible from the outside, but this judgement is not exclusive to those who worked there. It can also be developed through method and sector expertise. The best combination is technology working with specialists who interpret information and turn it into decisions.

You always remain connected to Congress even after leaving, and it is always interesting to discuss how to change the approach towards long term public policies built through broad agreement. Anyone monitoring legislation will find precisely this: when agreement exists, rules move forward; without it, even a very good rule remains stalled. Whether it is a rule or an investment project, it must be discussed with the people it will affect. That means not only companies but the territory as well. In the rush, those opportunities are omitted and problems appear later.

Congress performs essential functions: legislating, representing and exercising political oversight. But its results are more sustainable when the legislative agenda connects with public policies, the budget and what the Executive Branch and regional and local governments can actually implement. Building agreement is not complicity. Nor does it mean giving up oversight. It means ensuring differences are processed within institutions and that every decision has a sound basis and a real possibility of being implemented. That is the challenge: a national agenda that extends beyond current events and changes of government.