Abstract
It is widely acknowledged that top-down support is essential for bottom-up participatory projects to be effectively implemented at scale. However, which level of government, national or sub-national, should be given the responsibility to implement such projects is an open question, with wide variations in practice. This paper analyses qualitative and quantitative data from a natural experiment of a large participatory project in the state of Rajasthan in India comparing central management and state-level management. We find that locally managed facilitators formed groups that were more likely to engage in collective action and be politically active, with higher savings and greater access to subsidised loans.
Highlights
The vast literature on decentralization and devolution is relatively silent on the relationship between facilitators and governments. This paper examines these issues by focusing on the case of the Indian National Rural Livelihoods Mission (NRLM)
Within the Resource Blocks, we interviewed the most senior project officer in the state of Rajasthan, who was in charge of coordinating Society for the Elimination of Rural Poverty (SERP) activities along with the government
We interviewed 40 Community Resource Persons (CRP) from SERP out of a total of 120 who were actively working in Rajasthan at the time of the survey
Summary
Devolving funds and management functions to local communities is an important, and heavily funded, tenet of development assistance (Mansuri and Rao 2012, Smoke, Loffler and Bossi, 2013). The practice relies heavily on the principle of subsidiarity, i.e., the idea that local institutions are in the best position to meet community needs because they are close to the people, have good knowledge about local preferences and have strong incentives to promote accountability, reduce corruption and increase the efficiency of resource allocation within their boundaries. In Intensive Blocks a team of local women, provided with little visible support from the government, are viewed as community members building on existing networks and capacities for long-term change Their relationship to the state is not obvious – they are building on the Rajasthani sub-national tradition of social mobilization through non-state actors. For the purposes of this paper we focus on the “treatment” areas where RRLP was scheduled to work in order to check if Intensive and Resource blocks had statistically similar characteristics prior to the entry of NRLM facilitators This sub-sample consists of 3,852 households with 6 villages sampled per block in each of the 32 RRLP treatment blocks, scattered across 17 districts.. In our conversations with the director of the SERP program as well as with the SERP facilitators, we found that they were keen to work on their own, but did not always speak the local language fluently. As a result, they were generally given strictly defined and narrow tasks to perform in a specific amount of time, with clear deliverables
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