Evaluating Community Based And Community Driven Development: A Critical Review of the Evidence VIEW OF THE EVIDENCE

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Evaluating Community Based And Community Driven
Development A Critical Review of the Evidence
VIEW OF THE EVIDENCE

• Ghazala Mansuri and Vijayendra Rao, DECRG

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Purpose of the Paper

• To critically assess independent evidence
• To identify gaps and locate lessons for policy

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Caveats

• CBD vs. CDD- we look at both
• We focus on papers by independent scholars or
  articles in peer reviewed publications.

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Some Claims of CDD

• Well Targeted
• Improves Supply and Quality of Public Services
• Improves Capacity for Collective Action Social
  Capital

• More Sustainable
• Risk of Elite Capture Is Low
• Can Be Easily Scaled Up

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Community Driven Development relies on
communities to use their social capital to
organize themselves and participate in
development processes.
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• Community
• Endogenous Concept
• Analytical Rather than Empirical Concept
• Participation
• May not always be empowering
• May not always be necessary
• Social Capital
• In its popular use, ignores local relations of
  power (Bourdieu vs Putnam)
• Assumes that social capital can be built
• Assumes that all social capital is good stuff?

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THE EVIDENCE
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Poverty Targeting

• Centers ability to target is constrained
• Decentralized community based targeting can be
  better than centralized targeting, but evidence
  is limited.
• Despite this, targeting of the poor within
  communities tends to be weak.
• It is useful to distinguish between use
  targeting and preference targeting
• Poor targeting may also result from political
  economy considerations or perverse incentives
  created by project performance requirements.

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Service Delivery

• Some evidence that CBD/CDD projects create
  effective community infrastructure and improve
  welfare outcomes.
• Studies do not establish that it is the
  participatory elements in CBD/CDD projects that
  are responsible for causally improving project
  outcomes.
• Very few studies that compare CBD/CDD projects
  with centralized mechanisms of service delivery
  controlled by line ministries so it is difficult
  to tell if alternate project designs would have
  produced better outcomes.

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Participation Social Capital

• Some quantitative evidence showing an associative
  relationship between social capital and project
  effectiveness, but direction of causality is
  unclear.
• CBD/CDD is perhaps likely to be more effective in
  cohesive and better-managed communities.
• Very Little Convincing Evidence-needs much more
  attention

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Inequality and Heterogeneity

• Impact of economic inequality is complex and
  perhaps U shaped.
• Role of social heterogeneity is even more complex
  and difficult to measure.
• Most empirical studies which devise simple
  measures of social fractionalization-show that it
  inhibits collective activity.
• The success of community driven development may
  also be affected by how well heterogeneity is
  managed or regulated.

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Elite Capture

• Social Networks affect who benefits, political
  connections matter, generally speaking elites
  tend to dominate.
• Not clear, however, that this always represents
  capture -- need to distinguish between
  benevolent vs malevolent capture.
• Evidence shows that targeting is markedly worse
  in more unequal communities.
• Important to understand the checks and balances
  that are most effective in reducing capture
• No studies which look at this question in the
  context of an appropriate counterfactual.

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Role of External Agents

• Central to local level project effectiveness -but
  understudied
• Good Facilitators need to be charismatic leaders,
  trainers, anthropologists, engineers, economists,
  and accountants
• But often poorly trained, clash of incentives

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Role of the State

• Upward commitment state must provide enabling
  institutional environment. Line ministries need
  to be responsive to the needs of communities, and
  national governments should be committed to the
  idea of transparent, accountable, and democratic
  governance.
• Downward accountability of community leaders
  answerable primarily to beneficiaries rather than
  to political and bureaucratic superiors.
• Need to avoid Supply driven demand driven
  development

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Issues related to scaling up projects

• Scaling up led by a led by a large bureaucracy.
• Incentives Problem
• Low experience, poor training of facilitators.
• Poor Monitoring and Evaluation Praise Culture
• Seeing Like State ignoring local context.

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How should we scale up?

• Best practice is absence of best practice
• Learning by Doing
• Slow and Gradual long term horizon
• Well evaluated acceptance of failure.
• Integrated with higher levels of administration
• Based on evidence not naïve optimism.