‘Community driven development’ (CDD) has become a popular donor strategy in seeking to improve local institutions in developing countries. This study evaluates a CDD project in Sierra Leone that combined block grants for local public goods with intensive training and requirements for minority inclusion designed to catalyse collective action and empowerment. The study finds positive short-term effects on local public goods provision and economic outcomes, but no sustained impacts on collective action, decision-making processes, or the involvement of marginalised groups in local affairs. It also indicates the value of a pre-analysis plan in avoiding distorted results.
The study addresses the challenges of measuring institutional performance empirically by exploiting a randomly assigned governance intervention – involving 236 villages, 2,832 households, and a timeframe of over four years (2005-2009) – and by:
- Using a pre-analysis plan: The research and project teams agreed to a set of hypotheses regarding the likely areas of programme impacts before the intervention began. As the project came to a close, they added to this document the exact outcome measures and econometric specifications to be used to evaluate success, and archived this pre-analysis plan before analysing the follow-up data.
- Developing objective real-world measures of institutions and collective action: These combined rich household survey data with ‘structured community activities’ facilitating observation and measurement of how communities: (i) respond to a matching grant opportunity to purchase building materials at a subsidised price; (ii) make a communal decision between two comparable alternatives; and (iii) allocate a valuable asset (provided for free) among community members.
The GoBifo (‘Move Forward’) project in Sierra Leone sought to provide public goods and change institutions by establishing organisational structures to streamline collective action and by imposing participation requirements to enhance the influence of marginalised groups. The project provided block grants for constructing local public goods and sponsoring trade skills training and small business start-up capital. It also provided technical assistance that promoted democratic decision-making, the participation of women and youth in local politics, and transparent budgeting practices.
The evaluation found that the project was well-implemented and was successful in setting up new village structures, improving the stock of local public goods and enhancing economic welfare. However, the project did not lead to lasting changes in village institutions, local collective action capacity, social norms and attitudes, or the nature of de facto political power:
- The establishment of local committees, development plans and bank accounts did not lead to permanent reductions in the fixed organising costs of collective action. This was perhaps because communities did not adopt and apply the new structures and tools more widely.
- Exposure to democratic project processes did not make traditional elites more willing to seek out the views of others in making community decisions.
- Participation requirements did not foster learning-by-doing or demonstration effects large enough to change attitudes, norms or behaviours towards marginalised groups taking on leadership roles. Women and youth were no more likely to voice opinions about how the community should manage new public assets at the end of the project than at the beginning.
- Regarding methodological lessons, in the absence of a pre-analysis plan, two highly divergent, equally erroneous interpretations of the impacts – one positive, one negative – could have been generated.
More research is needed into the reforms and external interventions that can successfully reshape institutions to enhance collective action capacity while promoting accountability and inclusion. Additional implications are that:
- It is important to register a pre-analysis plan to prevent the ‘cherry picking’ of results and to generate appropriately sized statistical tests.
- ‘Structured community activities’ provide an example of participatory and contextually-specific tools to measure institutional behaviours that are concrete and standardised.
