Chris Blattman

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Participatory versus executive decision-making, the randomized control trial

A new paper on Sierra Leone, Chief for a Day, presented by Maarten Voors at the ABCA conference:

in a random subsample of villages the traditional elite, including the chief, were made responsible for project management. In other villages, responsibility for project management was delegated to a committee of randomly selected villagers.

While our simple theoretical model proposes that more powerful chiefs will be more corrupt by diverting more resources from the public good to their personal benefit, will under-invest in management of the project, and will seek to undermine the performance of managing committees, our empirical findings provide a more nuanced and mixed picture of the quality of local management in Africa.

Our field experiment finds little evidence that local elites managing an aid project divert more resources than the average villager, or that more powerful chiefs divert more than less powerful ones. Moreover, the village elites are able to manage a development project better than a committee of randomly selected villagers…

Projects managed by village elites are also more likely to start and be completed on time, are better constructed and maintained, and provide more (perceived) benefits for the villagers.

I think this project is more an indictment of the often naive approach to local politics in most NGO and other development programs, rather than an indictment of participatory decision-making per se.

One example: if we look at our own communities or organizations, clearly a leader or committee can be more effective if there are established channels or organizations that provide information or implement decisions, if people understand the roles and responsibilities of the decision-makers, or if those decision-makers have legitimacy in the eyes of the governed.

What that means is that changing the identity of the decision-maker may be less important if the organizations and processes and popular understanding are not changed as well. There’s a difference between changing the identity of who is in the CEO position and changing whether or not power goes to a CEO or a brand new committee.

Another example: what matters for executive decision-making is probably how constrained and accountable is the chief. Businesses prefer CEOs to committees, but that CEO is still accountable to a board, shareholders, labor law, the market, and a set of rules governing transitions of power. SO CEOs have incentives to be effective. So “chief” does not equal “despot”.

In sum, local politics may be difficult to change if it is not understood.

13 Responses

  1. My own research shows that well-structured participatory financial decision making delivers 80+ of benefits to projects that benefit all the people, but when elites make these decisions (representational governance) less than 20% of revenues go to projects or cash that benefit the majority.

    But allocation differs from efficiency. Elites are quite good at managing projects that benefit themselves. Thus, my immediate suspicion is that the research referred to in this blog is investigating efficiency, not equity..

  2. Hmmm. So this is an analysis of whether one form of decision-making is better or worse than another. Better or worse according to whose standards? Ours. And who are we? We are the elite of another culture.

    Who is to say that our elite standards are worth emulating? Why, we say it.

    Every tribe, everywhere, and every tribal elite, thinks that their standards are the best. But most tribes do not attempt to extend their standards across the surface of the entire globe. That is the peculiarity of our tribe: the colonial and post-colonial West.

    Maybe we should spend more time examining the decision-making processes of our own tribe. And given the social mess that is today the United States, there are very good (by our own standards) reasons for doing so, before we deign to export them to all people everywhere.

  3. I’m curious to understand why, in their theoretical model, villagers would be expected to be less rent-seeking than chiefs, if given the opportunity. I find that expectation surprising.

    It’s also interesting that the posited difference between elites and others seems to be immaterial – the model asks about but doesn’t seem to either expect that elites can provide added value in PDPs due to their elite connections and access, nor that their elite status reflects any sort of competency to have achieved/maintained it over time. It is treated almost as a randomized variable itself – like they drew the “elite” card from a life lottery at birth, but are otherwise interchangeable with non-elite villagers who have very different histories and life experiences. That assumption also strikes me as surprising.

    I find it much less surprising that, in practice, the assumptions of this model didn’t hold up to reality (although having this data is valuable, and the lack of distinction between more and less powerful chiefs is interesting).

  4. “In sum, ________ may be difficult to change if it is not understood.”

    You could fill in that blank with pretty much anything.

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