Stress-testing a university social responsibility alignment framework in a post-conflict Latin-American setting

This study applies a stress-test protocol as a diagnostic tool to evaluate the operational alignment of University Social Responsibility (USR) policies in an institutionally fragile setting. A public university in Ayacucho, Peru, located in a post-conflict setting with specific historical and socio-political characteristics, operates as an exploratory application of the protocol across six alignment dimensions: stability, adaptability, coherence and coordination, effective implementation, public-interest orientation, and efficiency. A phenomenological-hermeneutic case design combines ten semi-structured interviews with five USR-responsible faculty members, one university authority, and four senior students, an applied observation checklist with 25 items organized in seven thematic blocks, and field diary observations. The diagnostic findings configure a systemic pattern in which each dimension exhibits specific modalities of operational fragility that coexist with formal frameworks present at the institution: normative framework without operational sustainability, institutional capacity without transfer to the USR subsystem, documentary alignment without operationalization, absence of measurement mechanisms, receptive but not participatory community engagement, and non-compliance with the applicable regulatory framework. The protocol demonstrates the capacity to produce differentiated diagnostic maps that orient contextually adequate decisions in contexts of institutional fragility. The study's contribution is methodological and contextual: it introduces a parsimonious stress-test protocol, based on triangulated qualitative evidence and two low-computational-cost operational indicators, for examining the internal alignment of USR policies in settings where conventional USR models assume institutional continuity that is not guaranteed. The analytical transferability of the protocol is relevant for public universities in comparable post-conflict contexts, with local recalibration of thresholds and procedures according to the fiscal and normative particularities of each case.