Management of community representation in the mediation of social conflicts by the vice-governors in a district of La Libertad, Peru

Background Social conflicts mediated by local authorities represent a central governance challenge in rural and peri-urban districts of Peru. Deputy governors (tenientes gobernadores) serve as unpaid representatives of the Executive Branch at the community level; however, their conflict mediation capacity has rarely been studied empirically. This study examined the impact of community representation management on social conflict mediation by deputy governors in a district of La Libertad, Peru, in 2026. Although prior studies have separately examined institutional weakness, community participation and conflict transformation in Peru, none has quantified how deputy governors’ community representation practices specifically shape their mediation effectiveness; this gap motivated the present study. Methods A quantitative, applied, non-experimental, cross-sectional correlational-explanatory design was used. A sample of 300 residents was surveyed using two validated Likert-scale questionnaires (20 items each). Instruments were validated by five expert judges and reliability was assessed with Cronbach’s alpha. Data were analysed through descriptive statistics and ordinal regression using SPSS v.27. Results Community representation management significantly predicted social conflict mediation (χ 2 = 141.803; df = 2; p < 0.01; Nagelkerke R 2 = 0.457; β = 0.75), explaining 45.7% of the variance in mediation outcomes. All four dimensions — institutional articulation, social trust, forms of representation, and participation capacity — were independently associated with improvements across all five mediation dimensions (all p < 0.01). The strongest effects were observed for Forms of Representation (R 2 = 0.456; β = 0.74) and Social Trust (R 2 = 0.355; β = 0.56). Conclusions Strengthening community representation management substantially improves the conflict mediation capacity of deputy governors, with direct implications for training programmes and inter-institutional coordination policies aligned with Sustainable Development Goal 16. Read through Arnstein’s ladder of citizen participation, practices closest to partnership were the most strongly linked to mediation.