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Concerned with the challenges of sustainable development, policy makers and scholars often urge nongovernmental organizations to increase their efforts to support governance of natural resources in developing countries. How does funding from external NGOs influence the responsiveness of local government policy to the sector-specific needs and policy preferences of local citizens? Using a unique longitudinal dataset from surveys of local governance actors in 200 municipalities in Bolivia and Guatemala from 2001 to 2007, we explore these questions in the context of local natural resource policy. We find preliminary support for the hypothesis that external NGOs gain disproportionate influence over local policy processes in forestry by donating to local governments, and that this influence "crowds out" the influence of local grassroots actors, leading to less responsive local governance as rated by councils of local citizens. However, political pressure on local government officials from organized local groups in the forestry sector counteracts this negative relationship. Although NGOs can contribute to technical capacity for local governments and are generally seen as supportive of decentralized and participatory governance, our findings suggest that NGOs exert political pressure on local governments in pursuit of their own policy goals, and that NGO support may sometimes steer local governments away from responding to the specific livelihood needs of local resource users. More generally, our findings underscore the importance of local political contexts in moderating the effects of NGO interventions.

Using a dataset that includes over 17 million students from across all 50 states, we estimate the causal impact of making structural transitions into middle school (in grades 4, 5, 6, or 7) on student math and reading achievement trajectories. This dataset provides an ideal opportunity to engage in the valuable scientific practice of conducting replication studies. Prior research on the impacts of middle school transitions is of high quality and rests on a strong causal warrant, but the study settings vary greatly and use data from a prior decade. We conduct a replication (i.e., using the same methods on different data) using larger, broader, and more recent data. We extend prior analyses in ways that may further strengthen the causal warrant. Finally, we explore heterogeneity of effects across subgroups and states, which may help reconcile differences in the magnitude of estimated effects across studies.