Community-driven Development Program Research Articles

Identifying spatially differentiated pathways for rural transformation in Pakistan1

This paper proposes a conceptual and empirical framework to develop rural transformation strategies tailored to the agroecological potential and market access of rural areas in Pakistan. Such a framework allows to move away from stereotypical countrywide policies as in use in Pakistan and many other countries. Using publicly available geospatial measures of vegetation greenness and an urban gravity model to proxy the agricultural market demand, we classify Pakistan’s rural districts into categories with similar comparative advantages and describe dominant livelihood activities. The framework recommends market-based approaches to support commercial agriculture or non-agriculture business development in well-connected areas and where households have accumulated human and physical capital. In areas with less developed agricultural potential or market access, households will benefit from area-based and community-driven development, skill development, and labor programs. Since data collection is often challenging in rural areas, statistical agencies can use such an empirical framework to advise policymakers on prioritizing public investments and tailoring rural transformation pathways. In addition, statistical agencies can also extend the framework at different levels of resolution, from national to local level, and complement it with primary data sources to validate the usefulness of the approach.

The Impacts of Community-Driven Development Program in Conflict-Affected Regions: Evidence from Cambodia

Abstract This study evaluates the effects of the Cambodia Rural Development Program, specifically focusing on income generation and social capital. By employing a difference- in-differences framework and propensity score matching, the study finds a statistically significant positive impact on income, primarily driven by increased engagement in regular income-generating activities. However, the study also finds that the program has a limited effect on village-level collective actions, social cohesion, and perceived safety while inadvertently discouraging financial contributions to community projects. Additionally, trust between villagers and government officials remains unchanged. Heterogeneous analyses reveal the ineffective participation of trauma-experienced subgroups, highlighting the need for tailored approaches in conflict-affected regions.

“Want to help someone? Shut up and listen”: Foreign aid, maladaptation, and community development practices in the Pacific

AbstractMotivationThrough a Fiji case analysis, this article elaborates on how well‐intentioned foreign aid initiatives can result in maladaptation for local communities. When most well‐intentioned foreign aid institutions become aware of development problems in the Pacific Island Countries, they start planning development interventions. However, maladaptation can occur where there is insufficient community input, creating conditions that worsen situations and make communities more vulnerable.PurposeThe study highlights a way to improve the sustainability and effectiveness of development projects with local communities by analysing two case studies. One is a community project driven by a civil society organization (CSO) and the other is community‐driven development (CDD) project in Fiji.Approach and methodsThe researcher engaged in community field studies while working as a civil servant in Fiji for 12 years and has continued these studies as a researcher for five years. The data used in this article are both experiential and research‐based. Action research took place when the author supported CDD programmes based on traditional farming. This study provides a longitudinal view that includes critical auto‐ethnography and talanoa.FindingsThis study finds that the CSO did not appreciate community aspirations and local knowledge, leading to community maladaptation in response to their programme intervention. By contrast, CDD in the same locale saw community members take control of strategizing, carrying out development activities, and monitoring. This directly contributed to community resilience and collective well‐being, in addition to making the CDD activities more sustainable than those dependent on donor funding.Policy implicationsThis article showcases the value of CDD for Pacific communities and the importance of accounting for local aspirations and worldviews. Thus, policies in Pacific Island Countries should ensure that any community development programmes respect people's culture and understand their notions of well‐being and resilience, and so contribute to more self‐determined development.

Women’s Resistance: An Alternative Perspective to Women’s Participation in Community-Driven Development

Community-driven development (CDD) programs compel communities to adopt egalitarian decision-making processes for the duration of the project. However, dominant groups use their power to orchestrate a public performance of social domination and subordinated groups combat social domination via subtle acts of resistance. Rather than conceptualizing social transformation from a holistic perspective that includes subtle acts of resistance and incremental forms of self-empowerment, CDD implementation and monitoring focusses on women’s public performance in community meetings, and this approach generally fails to produce social transformation. We conducted an ethnography of an unconditional direct transfer to a village in Western Mali. We used Bourdieu’s approach to investigate how rural Malian women resist domination and empower themselves in this unfettered CDD project. We observed the women strategically submit to patriarchal forms of domination during the public decision-making processes but resist male domination over their labour. Our results suggest that CDD can better achieve enduring forms of social change when it builds off local women’s self-directed forms of resistance. To better capture women’s resistance and self-empowerment, CDD should adopt a more holistic and open impact assessment approach, such as the Most Significant Change technique and Culturally Responsive Evaluation.

The Impact of Community-Driven Development Program on Rural Households Economic Well-being: Evidence from Village Funds

Indonesia has implemented the concept of community-driven development in rural areas through village funds since 2015. Village funds are one of the instruments to minimize the impact of Covid-19 in rural areas. This research was conducted to provide an overview of the impact evaluation of village funds on the economic well-being of rural communities in each household quantile. This study uses data on the characteristics of 35,759 households obtained from merging results of the March & September 2020 Susenas data with the village fund data in each district/city area. Data were analyzed using smoothed instrumental variables quantile regression, which overcame endogeneity issues and produced robust estimates. The study results show that the village fund has a positive and significant impact on the economic well-being of rural households. Still, their impact is felt more by the upper middle class and households in the Sumatra region.

Leaders need to be led: complementary followership in the context of community-driven development program

ABSTRACT Leadership has often been recognised as a major driver for successful team effectiveness. However, even weak leadership may lead to good team performance, and it is worth studying how weak leadership can be helped and complemented by followership. To investigate the paradoxical mechanism behind leadership – followership practices, we examined (1) multidimensional figures of leadership and followership using the multifactor leadership questionnaire (MLQ) and (2) the impacts of the combinations of leadership and followership on team performances both during and after a community-driven development (CDD) program. To that end, this study examines a rural CDD case implemented by the Korea International Cooperation Agency and the Myanmar Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, and Irrigation. The analyses present some common patterns of how weak leadership and strong followership can lead to better performance than other combinations of leadership and followership. We conclude with theoretical and practical conditions of “complementary followership”, i.e., the complementary combinations of leadership and followership in group performance.

Long-Run Effects of Aid: Forecasts and Evidence from Sierra Leone

Abstract We evaluate the long-run effects of a decentralised approach to economic development called community-driven development—a prominent strategy for delivering foreign aid—by revisiting a randomised community-driven development program in Sierra Leone 11 years after launch. We estimate large persistent gains in local public goods and market activity, and modest positive effects on institutions. There is suggestive evidence that community-driven development may have slightly improved the communities’ response to the 2014 Ebola epidemic. We compare estimates to the forecasts of experts from Sierra Leone and abroad, working in policy and academia, and find that local policymakers are overly optimistic about the effectiveness of community-driven development.

Aid Against Trees? Evidence from a Community-Driven Development Program in the Philippines

Aid Against Trees? Evidence from a Community-Driven Development Program in the Philippines

Indigenizing Participation for Sustainable Community-Based Development Programmes in Ghana

The efficacy of indigenous knowledge and local participation has been argued to be some of the pathways to curbing the present indigenous community development impasse. Employing an in-depth qualitative research approach, 32 traditional and community development leaders as well as local government officials were interviewed to ascertain local the present community development paradigms and proposed future pathways. Drawing from local insights and a range of scholarly perspectives this paper assessed how meaningful indigenous knowledge systems and indigenous people can actively engage and sustain community-driven development programmes. Utilizing a process analysis, the paper, established that there is a disconnect between indigenous community knowledge systems, values, norms and other cultural realities and contemporary participatory community development approaches. It further illustrates, the absence of local participation in community development and proposed a framework for the integration of indigenous knowledge systems, institutions and other cultural realities in community-based development programmes to ensure development sustainability.

Topography and scale in a community-driven maternal and child health program in Eastern Indonesia

In 2007, the Indonesian government introduced Generasi, a community-driven development program to address village priorities such as reducing poverty, maternal mortality, and child mortality. When describing Generasi’s biggest challenges, program facilitators on the eastern Indonesian island of Flores used a geographic vocabulary of fields (medan, lapangan) and topography (topografi) that evokes the demands of supervising Generasi’s implementation across dozens of mountain villages with poor infrastructure. But their geographic language also extends metaphorically to the enduring problems of scale and governance. I analyze these discourses of topography and field in relation to the changing therapeutic landscape of maternal and child health services in the Manggarai highlands of western Flores, then follow Generasi’s scalar scaffolding from the meetings and clinics in villages, to the technocratic policy work in Jakarta, and to the academic spaces of Auckland and Cambridge.

Mitigating the impacts of floods using adaptive and resilient coping strategies: The role of the emergency Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty program (LEAP) in Ghana

Understanding how households make use of adaptive and resilient coping strategies are steps in the right direction of dealing with disaster risks and extreme weather and climate events. In the recent past, safety nets programs have been quickly scaled up to respond to some of these climate-related and other types of shocks in a bid to improve resilience and restore the productive capacity of households. In Ghana for instance, there has been the flagship Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) program from which stemmed an ad-hoc cash grant program, Emergency LEAP which is rolled out to victims of natural disasters like floods, storms, and droughts. Based on the above, this paper analyzes the role of the Emergency LEAP in building the adaptive and resilient nature of households against floods. With insights from an extended version of the Protection Motivation Theory (PMT), the paper hypothesizes that relief assistance has a negative impact on the adoption of risk mitigation measures against floods. The study employs both binary and count data models like the Probit, the Poisson, and the Negative Binomial models respectively to establish the impact of such relief assistance on the adaptive behavior of households.The findings reject the null hypothesis; thus, strengthening the argument that relief assistance has a negative influence on the use of resilient coping strategies. Furthermore, the study establishes that experience in floods increases the resilient nature of households. The study concludes that social safety net programs like the emergency LEAP could perform better if given a renewed focus that transcends beyond just cash benefit to including much better long-term interventions like the integration of community-driven development (CDD) programs as well as inducing behavioral change through information access and education.

Development Projects and Economic Networks: Lessons from Rural Gambia

Abstract This article investigates the effects of development projects on economic networks. To this end, we study the impact that a randomly allocated Community-Driven Development program in The Gambia has on economic interactions within rural villages. The program provides an exogenous source of variation to village-level stocks of productive capital and to village-wide collective activities. Based on detailed data on economic and social networks, we find a significant reduction of transfers in these networks in treatment villages. Guided by a theoretical framework, we investigate several possible mechanisms and find evidence that is consistent with two channels. First, the evidence points to modest wealth effects and a village-level transformation process towards a more formal economy. Second, we also find evidence that is consistent with elite capture, favouritism, and unequally distributed benefits leading to reductions in social capital and thus economic transactions. Overall, our findings suggest changes in networks as an avenue through which development interventions may have unintended consequences.

Pembangunan yang Terbayang: Imajinasi Sosio-Teknikal dalam Implementasi Pembangunan Berbasis Komunitas di Indonesia

This paper discusses the involvement of imagination in the implementation of several techniques for societal improvement introduced by intervention programs in Indonesia. Using the perspective of socio-technical imagination, I contend that the implementation of the World Bank’s Community-Driven Development (CDD) in Indonesia does not only revolve around technical matters, but also structured by collective imagination held by various development actors regarding the formation of desired social order. This paper is part of my reflexivity regarding my involvement as a researcher and filmmaker in a research project designed to evaluate the impact of the implementation of CDD program in health and education sector in Indonesia. The research was conducted from the end of 2016 to the mid of 2017. Based on this experience, this paper examines the way in which imaginations invoked in programs implementation influence the process of film making that involved various development actors ranging from the World Bank’s technocrats in Jakarta, program’s implementer in province, district, sub-district, and village level, to target groups of intervention program in the village.

Negotiating Impossibilities in Community-driven Development in Indonesia

This article examines four normative expectations of community-driven development (CDD) programs and their concomitant criticisms from the perspective of community-based volunteers (CBVs). These volunteers compromise on the ideals of CDD to achieve results. Their compromises often become the focus of criticism. In devolving limited control over development resources to the local level, CDD also devolves the responsibility for failure. Based on a case study of a CDD program in Medan, Indonesia, this article argues that the way CBVs negotiate the impossibilities of CDD in urban contexts should become the starting point for a more realistic approach to making CDD succeed.

The Capability Approach and Evaluation of Community-Driven Development Programs

Community-driven development (CDD)—a development paradigm that upholds community participation and empowerment—has become an integral part of the World Bank’s operational strategy in the last few decades. It claims to bring better development results in terms of poverty reduction, good governance, effectiveness, sustainability and inclusive development. However, despite its claims and popularity, actual evidence of the development impacts of CDD has been mixed. One reason for the mixed results can be attributed to the incompatibility between the top-down evaluation methods used and CDD’s principles and processes. This paper argues that the Capability Approach (CA) pioneered by Sen and Nussbaum can be used as an evaluation framework to more effectively evaluate CDD programs. The CA is compatible with CDD’s principles of valuing agency and empowerment; it offers a broad informational base for normative judgement; and it is sensitive to gender and individual differences. This paper will also address challenges in operationalizing the CA to evaluate CDD programs in particular and development projects in general and will apply the proposed operationalization principles to develop a list of capabilities suitable for measuring poverty reduction, a key objective of CDD interventions, thus showing that the operationalization of the CA is possible.

Community Driven Development and Structural Disadvantage: Interrogating the Social Turn in Development Programming in Indonesia

Community-driven development (CDD) programmes have emerged on a large scale in the Global South following research and policy work regarding social capital, capabilities and empowerment. This paper analyses one of the largest international examples of the ‘social’ turn, examining the effects of the CDD approach in governmental, structural and relational terms. While the CDD approach successfully generated new political rationalities and governmental technologies, the ability of development programming driven by social capital concepts to empower marginalised sections of society remains in question. The ambiguities associated with CDD outcomes indicate the contradictions at the heart of social capital debate.

Gaji Sejuta: Moral experiences and the possibilities for self in a community-driven development program in Indonesia

This article explores the moral experiences of volunteers working in a ‘community driven development’ program in Medan, Indonesia. Reframing development as a moral experience helps to illuminate its potential as a site for self-becoming: a potential that lies not only in the ethical dilemmas that development provokes but also in the affective and emotive responses made possible in scenes of development. For low class volunteers who are excluded from other forms of virtuous action, their participation provides an opportunity to enact an understanding of self in relation to others, and before God. It is in the minutiae of acts of care that overt representations and affective responses bear upon the ‘self-in-relation’, and as such, invite possibilities for new self-imaginaries. A focus on the experiences of local volunteers who come from modest socio-economic backgrounds reveals an unacknowledged consequence of community driven development: the expansion of possibilities for self.

ECONOMIC EVALUATION OF THE NATIONAL PROGRAM FOR COMMUNITY EMPOWERMENT ON INDONESIAN RURAL POVERTY: A CASE STUDY OF ACEH PROVINCE

As the largest community-driven development (CDD) program in the globe, National Program for Community Empowerment of Indonesia (PNPM Mandiri) faces a noble target to achieve Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) which is declared in 2015 that formerly named Millennium Development Goal (MDG). In the intervening time, PNPM Mandiri is transformed to newly-established institution, Village Law, according to the Law no.6 / 2014. For encountering those challenges policy-makers needs to evaluate their existed development program and re-design the blueprint of present institution to favor the marginalized poor to sustain their economic viability. This article seeks to investigate determinants of village budget allocation of PNPM Mandiri investments from its first earmarked in 2007 and 2011. An evaluation of their return to investment in terms of poverty mitigation within the time frame was also incorporated within the study. It was finally documented that villages-specific endowment prior to PNPM Mandiri establishment were suggested to have reasonable contribution to endogeneity on villagers’ decision to select particular allocations. And the allocation of investment were relatively significant to alleviate village’s poverty. Keywords : Community-Driven Development Program, Budget Allocation, Poverty, Economic Evaluation

Autonomous but constrained: CBOs and urban upgrading in Indonesia

Community-driven development (CDD) programs, facilitated by decentralization, in developing countries have made community-based organizations (CBOs) key partners in new, participatory institutional arrangements for urban development and planning. Yet, little research exists on how such institutional arrangements and program design affect the capacity and effectiveness of CBOs. Studying the case of the Comprehensive Kampung Improvement Project (CKIP) in Surabaya, Indonesia, this paper illustrates how pre-existing relationships between influential local institutions impeded the capacity and performance of CBOs that were specifically created for implementing the program, and highlights general implications for involving CBOs in CDD.

Funds for Peace? Examining the Transformative Potential of Social Funds

<p class="REPBODY">Social funds and large-scale community driven development (CDD) programmes are a popular policy instrument in post-conflict situations. This is partly because they are seen to alleviate pressure on governments to deliver development and reconstruction outcomes by transferring resources and responsibilities to community actors. However, part of their popularity can also be explained by claims that social funds and CDD programmes have the (transformative) potential to generate impacts beyond meeting basic needs, such as creating more peaceful societies at the local level and promoting trust in government. Drawing on a rigorous, evidence focused literature review, which began with researchers following a formal systematic review protocol, this practice note assesses the performance of 13 programmes against three distinct sets of impact indicators: (i) incomes, enterprise and access to services; (ii) social cohesion, stability and violence; and (iii) state-society relations. It is concluded that, although our understanding of the effectiveness of social funds and CDD in conflict-affected environments is limited by a low number of rigorous evaluations across a diverse range of contexts, as well as by an insufficient investigation of the relevant causal mechanisms, the findings so far suggest cause for cautious optimism.