Vijayendra Rao (World Bank) March 2017 It is widely acknowledged that top-down support is essential for bottom-up participatory projects to be effectively implemented at scale. However, which level of government, national or sub-national, should be given the responsibility to implement such projects is an open question, with wide variations in practice. This paper analyzes qualitative and quantitative data from a natural experiment of a large participatory project in the state of Rajasthan in India comparing central management and state-level management. We find that locally managed facilitators formed groups that were more likely to engage in collective action, be politically active, with higher savings and greater access to subsidized loans. The authors are indebted to Radha Khan for supervising the qualitative fieldwork, Ritwik Sircar and Anirvan Chowdhury for outstanding research assistance, SRI-IMRB for collecting the quantitative data for this study, the Government of Rajasthan for sharing valuable data, PRADAN for valuable initial conversations, and the staff of PRADAN, PEDO, SERP and the Rajasthan SHG federations for their support. We are grateful to Georgetown University and the South Asia Food and Nutrition Security Initiative for their financial support. For excellent comments and conversations we thank the two anonymous referees, Radha Khan, Sanjay Sharma, Irfan Nooruddin, Milan Vaishnav, Anders Olofsgard and participants of the India Politics Workshop in Washington DC. This paper reflects the individual views of the authors and does not in any way represent the official position of the World Bank or its member countries.

Study history, study history. In history lies all the secrets of statecraft. Winston Churchill Getting history wrong is an essential part of being a nation. Ernest Renan [M]odern social science, policy-making and planning have pursued a model of scientism and technical manipulation which systematically, and deliberately, neglects human, and above all, historical, experience. The fashionable model of analysis and prediction is to feed all available current data into some notional or real supercomputer and let it come out with the answers … [S]uch a-historical or even antihistorical calculation is often unaware of being blind, and inferior to even the unsystematic vision of those who can use their eyes. Eric Hobsbawm

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