(Illustration by Ben Wiseman)
Among nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that work in developing countries, programs that seek to build democratic capacity in local communities have become an increasingly popular intervention. Now scholars are starting to examine whether (and how) such interventions actually work.
Three of those scholars—James D. Fearon and Jeremy M. Weinstein, who are both professors of political science at Stanford University, and Macartan Humphreys, a professor of political science at Columbia University—undertook a study that focused on a community-driven reconstruction (CDR) program in Liberia. An NGO called the International Rescue Committee (IRC) located 83 eligible communities in that country and randomly selected 42 of them to receive funding for CDR projects. Because one goal of the program was to nurture a capacity for collective action, IRC sponsored the creation of community development councils to oversee each project.
By creating a control group of 40-plus communities that did not join the program, IRC gave the researchers a rare opportunity to test the effects of that intervention. “This was one of the first CDR programs that was randomly assigned,” Fearon says. “It allowed us to be quite confident that the outcomes we measured were caused by the program.”
To test how the CDR program affected people’s ability to act collectively, researchers asked people in all 83 communities to play what’s known as a “contribution game.” The research team randomly selected 24 players from each community, and each player received a sum of money that was roughly equivalent to a week’s wages. Players then had to decide either to keep that money for their own use or to contribute some or all of it to a collective pot. Money in the pot would pay for a local development project, and the research team offered to match each player’s contributions to it. People in each community chose representatives to administer the project, and they had a week to share information about the game. In about half of the participating communities, both men and women took part in playing the game; in the other half, only women did so.
Fearon and his colleagues found that players in CDR communities contributed to the collective pot at higher levels than players in non-CDR communities. (Those contributions, according to the researchers, serve as a marker of collective action.) Notably, however, this result occurred only in CDR communities where both men and women played the game.
That gender-based finding reflects an important aspect of Liberian society. “Women in rural Liberia are not often making community-level decisions about land and resources,” says Jennifer Duncan, senior attorney and land tenure specialist at Landesa, an organization that helps poor people secure land rights. Any intervention that puts both women and men “at the table,” Duncan adds, will have “serious social, economic, and political consequences.”
What, in particular, accounts for the difference in results between communities with mixed-gender player groups and communities where only women played the game? Fearon and his colleagues emphasize the importance of culture. Women-only player groups, according to the researchers, didn’t draw on their recently acquired collaboration capacity for a simple reason: They didn’t have to. “If a community has a choice, it may not use its new capacity,” Fearon says. “It may use existing institutions to solve collective action problems.” Men and women in many parts of Liberia (as Duncan notes) have traditionally made collective decisions within separate spheres. In the contribution game, therefore, it’s likely that women-only groups reverted to using previously established networks and practices.
Traditional forms of collective action are present in most communities, Duncan observes. But NGOs and other outside groups “have little chance to understand how a culture works,” she says. “In many cases, that would take years.” Fearon, for his part, offers practical advice to those groups: “Starting with some anthropological work is a really good idea.”
James D. Fearon, Macartan Humphreys, and Jeremy M. Weinstein, “How Does Development Assistance Affect Collective Action Capacity? Results From a Field Experiment in Post-Conflict Liberia,” American Political Science Review, 109, 2015.
Read more stories by Rachel Wright.