Abstract
We explore the social capital impacts of a community-driven development project in the Philippines in which communities competed for block grants for infrastructure investment. The analysis uses a unique panel data set of about 2100 households, aggregated at the village-level, collected in 66 treatment and 69 comparison communities. We provide both difference-in-differences and propensity score matching estimates. We find that the project increased participation in village assemblies and the frequency with which local officials meet with residents and had a negative impact on collective action. There is also more limited evidence of a positive impact of the project on bridging (i.e., generalized) trust and of a negative impact on group membership.
Highlights
International aid organizations, multilateral organizations and national governments are increasingly favoring bottom-up approaches that involve local communities in project design and implementation
This paper explores the impacts on community-level social capital of the KALAHI-CIDSS, 1 Operations that take a Community-Driven Development (CDD) approach constitute 9 percent of World Bank lending annually (World Bank 2007)
Using a unique household panel dataset collected before the project started and after one cycle of subproject implementation in both treatment and matched control communities, we assess whether we can attribute to the project changes in social capital indicators
Summary
International aid organizations, multilateral organizations and national governments are increasingly favoring bottom-up approaches that involve local communities in project design and implementation. In addition to purely normative benefits (Sen 1999), participation is expected to lead to better outcomes through better poverty targeting, reduced project costs, improved maintenance and allocative efficiency. Community-Driven Development (CDD) projects are one way the World Bank has applied conventional wisdom about the value of participation. In a typical CDD project, communities prepare subproject proposals with the support of facilitators, compete over block grants to finance investments for local public goods, and are responsible for implementation and maintenance of those investments. The CDD approach promotes stakeholder involvement in all stages of the process from subproject identification to subproject maintenance
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