How does delegating decisions to communities affect the provision and use of a public service? Evidence from a field experiment in Bangladesh

Madajewicz, Malgosia; Tompsett, Anna; Habib, Md. Ahasan

doi:10.1016/j.jdeveco.2020.102609

Cited by 19 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…Thus, when applied to this class of problems, at least, the consensusbased process appears to have few drawbacks in terms of program impact. The costs of the consensus-based process are also limited: time costs to communities are somewhat greater, while costs to the implementing organization are similar for the consensus-based approach and the topdown approach; costs are at most 20% lower for the unregulated community participation approach (Madajewicz, Tompsett, and Habib 2021). However, our results suggest that policy-makers should be cautious about viewing participatory decision-making processes as a quick win or a "magic bullet."…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 72%

“…The two regions differ in important respects hypothesized to affect the success of participatory approaches and, more generally, collective action, including pre-intervention access to safe drinking water, cohesiveness, community size, religious fractionalization, and inequality. On average, the use of safe drinking water increased more with a deliberative, consensus-based approach to community participation in decision-making than with either a top-down approach to decision-making or unrestricted community decision-making (Madajewicz, Tompsett, and Habib 2021). This paper investigates heterogeneity in how the decision-making processes affected the program's impact.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These studies fall into two groups: the first group compares what happens when the same intervention is implemented with participatory approaches and top-down approaches, 1 while the second evaluates interventions that aim to induce more or better-informed participation in public service provision. 2 Both groups include studies that find strongly positive impacts of participatory approaches or increased participation (e.g., Madajewicz, Tompsett, and Habib 2021;Björkman and Svensson 2009), as well as many studies with null (e.g., Olken 2007;Arkedis et al 2021) or even negative (Allakulov et al 2023) results. The reasons for this heterogeneity remain uncertain.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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When Does Community Participation in Decision-Making Improve Outcomes? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Bangladesh.

Habib,

Madajewicz,

Tompsett

2023

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Development practitioners have long advocated for targeted beneficiary communities to participate in decision-making about how to provide local public goods and services. However, community participation in decision-making may have disadvantages as well as benefits, and the balance between the benefits and disadvantages may vary across different decisionmaking processes, interventions, and contexts. Previous studies of community participation in decision-making indeed report mixed results, but the underlying reasons for this remain uncertain. This study demonstrates that context matters. We investigate the heterogeneity of impacts in a field experiment conducted in two regions of rural Bangladesh. The experiment randomly assigns different decision-making processes to villages that receive otherwise identical interventions in the form of a program to increase access to safe drinking water. We show that a deliberative, consensus-based approach to community participation in decisionmaking has strongly heterogeneous effects compared to either a top-down approach or community decision-making without rules about how decisions are made. The consensusbased process doubles the program's impact in one region but barely increases it in the other. We use machine learning to identify the baseline characteristics and mechanisms that correlate most strongly with impact. The results suggest that the consensus-based process yields better outcomes when there is more at stake: specifically, when the community has fewer pre-existing safe sources of drinking water and thus more to gain from the intervention. The results are consistent with the view that inclusive participatory approaches to decisionmaking can increase program impacts but fully engaging in these processes is costly. When less is at stake, communities may not fully engage, and the advantages of inclusive participatory decision-making may not be realized.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 72%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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When Does Community Participation in Decision-Making Improve Outcomes? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Bangladesh.

Habib,

Madajewicz,

Tompsett

2023

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“…Paying close attention to how local aid allocation decisions are made is vitally important to ensure that aid efforts do not simply result in local elites benefitting themselves and becoming more firmly entrenched. Encouragingly, as shown by a recent randomized control trial of arsenic mitigation efforts in Bangladesh, there may be pathways for overcoming local elite capture using community participation in the siting of the wells (Madajewicsz et al, 2021; Cocciolo et al, 2021). While transaction and monitoring costs may mean that such approaches might not be feasible at scale, they may still provide policy makers with a means of overcoming elite capture in aid project siting.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Political Economy of Donor Control and Elite Capture in Arsenic Mitigation in Bangladesh

Brazys,

Mahmud

2023

The Journal of Environment & Development

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Numerous parts of the developing world are afflicted by pollution and poison from both man-made and natural sources. Efforts to mitigate these environmental contaminants are often inherently political, and it is difficult to discern if those efforts reach all intended beneficiaries. We argue that as spatial precision increases, it is likely that donors lose control of foreign aid. Using geo-spatial data, we find evidence in Bangladesh that efforts to mitigate groundwater arsenic are generally directed to broad areas with higher levels of contamination. However, within those areas, we find that mitigation measures supported by foreign aid only reduce arsenic when they are located near (politically important) exporting firms. We argue that this supports a political economy rationale wherein donors may be able to target their assistance at a mezzo level, while powerful socio-economic interests are able to capture and direct resources at a micro level, potentially exacerbating intra-country inequality.

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“…Top-down approaches, according to evidence, provide statistically considerably worse results in terms of achieving local community goals and final satisfaction [2][3][4]. Second, retaining scholarly arguments solely in the scholarly domain while excluding citizens from the process is increasingly seen as inappropriate [5], because the public may assist in putting scientific theories into practice.…”

Section: What Are the Benefits Of Conducting Participatory Research?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Sustainable Community-Based Tourism Development Model in Malang, Indonesia: A Participatory Action Research

Abbas¹,

Sumanto²,

Priambodo³

et al. 2023

Advances in Economics, Business and Management Research

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The goal of this work is to promote a sustainable community-based tourist industry in Bringin Village, Malang District, Indonesia, by using the participatory action research methodology (PAR) to a practical example of the village. The PAR model utilized in this study is divided into three circles: 1) problem identification and tourist capacity analysis; 2) strategic planning and communitybased tourism implementation at the place; and 3) assessment of long-term tourism development and plan revision. The PAR methodology uses 50 people's replies to questionnaires, site surveys, in-depth conversations, and three rounds of discussion with village policymakers to plan tourism implementation in each circle. Our result indicates that by using PAR, the involvement of communities in Bringin can contribute to the sustainability of tourism sites in Bringin. The involvement of all stakeholders is the key to create a sustainable tourist spot. An important note from our research is that because the PAR method is highly dependent on the social capital of a region, the PAR methods or steps used in our study cannot be directly applied to other regions.

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How does delegating decisions to communities affect the provision and use of a public service? Evidence from a field experiment in Bangladesh

Cited by 19 publications

References 26 publications

When Does Community Participation in Decision-Making Improve Outcomes? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Bangladesh.

When Does Community Participation in Decision-Making Improve Outcomes? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Bangladesh.

The Political Economy of Donor Control and Elite Capture in Arsenic Mitigation in Bangladesh

Sustainable Community-Based Tourism Development Model in Malang, Indonesia: A Participatory Action Research

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