
Brief 40: Development Assistance and Collective Action Capacity
In recent years, aid donors have embraced Community-Driven Reconstruction (CDR) projects that seek to rebuild trust through the collective provision of public services. After one such project in Liberia, a team of researchers conducted a follow-up experiment aimed at determining the impact of CDR projects on the capacity for collective action. The researchers found substantive, large effects of the CDR on how much people donated, but found that these effects only existed for cooperation between mixed gender groups; women only groups cooperated at high rates whether or not they were exposed to CDR programming.
Read Full StudyCategory: Conflict and Violence, Public Service Provision
Tags: CDR, CDD, community, cohesion, post-conflict, behavior, Liberia
Date of Publication: Wednesday, March 2, 2016
EGAP Researcher: Macartan Humphreys, Jeremy Weinstein
Other Authors: James D. Fearon
Partners: Photo credit David Stanley, available via Creative Commons BY 2.0
Geographical Region: Africa
Research Question: How do Community-Driven Reconstruction (CDR) projects affect trust and cooperation in a society?
Preparer: Seth Ariel Green
Liberia is a West African country of about 4.5 million people. About 85% of citizens live below the national poverty line. Liberia held democratic elections in 2005, formally resolving two devastating civil wars from 1989-2003. Though the wars ended after the elections, Liberia—like many post-conflict societies—deals with issues of mistrust between citizens.
Research Design:
In 2006, the UK government and the International Rescue Committee funded and implemented Community-Driven Reconstruction (CDR) projects across Liberia. Under these projects, a number of local councils throughout Liberia were given the chance to choose infrastructure projects for their villages and to implement their construction.
The authors hypothesize that this was because in the women-only condition villages, information spread through traditional women's networks, whereas the CDR was helpful in facilitating cooperation in the mixed-gender conditions, where citizens were likely to have previously had fewer between-gender interactions about public affairs.
First and foremost, this experiment shows the challenge (or perhaps impossibility) of finding a “one-size-fits-all” development project. An innovation that spurs trust in one place might have no impact in another, depending on local conditions and local power structures.
Second, policymakers would do well to pay attention to local power structures, including informal information networks like those that linked women in the single-gender condition.
Third, Community-Driven Reconstruction can have a substantial impact on both material and interpersonal well-being, shown by the increased generosity of many people who lived in villages with CDR projects. This is one of the very few CDR experiments that found evidence for positive social effects. The importance of this set of benefits, though difficult to precisely measure, should not be underestimated.