“So why did you start a communal farm?” I asked James. The young man, aged about 30, lived in a village of no more than 200 households cut out of the surrounding jungle and swamp. He’d organized about forty friends and neighbors into a collective to farm rice and cassava.
I’m interested in the roots of such collective action, especially in war torn and ethnically-riven societies like Liberia. Often a group action makes perfect sense: a collective can be more efficient than individual production when farming rice. Yet not everyone jumps at the opportunity, let alone be the one who instigates the group.
More puzzling, many groups serve a purpose greater than themselves. James’ communal rice group was officially a peacebuilding organization. They intervene in village conflicts, make contributions to their poorer neighbors, and train their neighbors in conflict resolution.
Is this altruism, or civic duty, and (if so) from whence does it spring? More importantly, can governments, churches and NGOs boost this ethereal quantity? Most of my randomized experiments in Uganda and Liberia are designed to get at this question, outside the lab.
What kind of man is James? A clever one. “The thing about these NGOs,” he said, referring to the dozens of relief agencies that have swarmed northern Liberia to rebuild, “they really seem to like groups. If you try to ask them for something, they cannot give it to you. But if you form a group, then they can come to you and bring you assistance.”
Now there is an interesting randomized experiment.
That makes sense on every level imaginable. If you are capable of forming a group (or at least the trappings of one), you are:
1) Reasonably bright,
2) Socially adept, and
3) Capable of resolving conflicts outside of violence.
Whether or not those folks think they’re gaming the system, they’re precisely the ones you’d want to select for. Indeed, a system where both the folks playing by the rules and the folks gaming the system have essentially the same characteristics would be tremendously robust.
I have heard the same comment from farmers! The group model represents many ag aid programs supported by MCC (and I would guess other donors too) in West Africa and beyond. So what would be the RCT? Offering aid to groups, to individuals and to some combo? Just based on millions of dollars being spent on group training, I think the efficacy of these groups is a very important question. The ag eval in Ghana looks at the impact of TA to groups and I hope gets at whether the groups as a ‘business unit’ actually work (ie, make yields and incomes rise in comparison to a counterfactual).
I don’t agree with the other commenter that the beneficiaries most likely to succeed are those that can game the system. I don’t see the evidence. Maybe they aren’t the ones that need aid as they are so entrepreneurial anyway; or maybe they are most likely to misuse the aid – we won’t know until we test it!
I think this is what “Do no harm” ideas are all about – set up your systems so that even unintended consequences are linkely to be neutral or good.
What James is experiencing is an institutionally pervasive orientalism, namely, the perception of poor people as intrinsically members of groups. Whereas in advanced capitalist countries the individual ideology prevails with normative fervor, in the developing country context we want to put the yoke of “community” onto every project that receives development funds.
This phenomenon is ably dissected in “Participation: the New Tyranny?”
by Bill Cooke (Editor), Uma Kothari (Editor)