Comparative Politics Speaker Series

Date: 

Thursday, September 29, 2016, 12:00pm to 2:00pm

Location: 

CGIS Knafel Building, 1737 Cambridge Street, Bowie-Vernon Room (K262)

"Does Community-Based Development Empower Citizens? Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation in Ghana"

Speaker:

Kate Baldwin, Associate Professor, Communication Studies, Rhetoric, and American Studies, School of Communications, Northwestern University.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Government, Harvard University.

Contacts:

Jessie Bullock 
jbullock@g.harvard.edu

Andrew Leber 
andrewmleber@g.harvard.edu

Shannon Parker 
shannonparker@g.harvard.edu

Faculty Advisors:

Gwyneth McClendon, Faculty Associate. Assistant Professor of Government and Social Studies, Departments of Government and Social Studies, Harvard University.

Yuhua Wang, Assistant Professor, Department of Government, Harvard University.

Abstract:

The “community-based development” (CBD) approach may empower citizens and improve outcomes through three mechanisms: (1) an immediate direct effect of engaging citizens to decide how to allocate resources within the community-based development program, (2) an indirect effect on capacity that improves citizen engagement with other community-level institutions, and (3) an indirect effect on capacity that improves representation within centralized government structures. Using a randomized evaluation of a nongovernmental-organization-led CBD program in Ghana, we examine whether CBD results in citizens’ empowerment to improve their socioeconomic well-being through these mechanisms. We find that the leadership training and experiences associated with CBD translate into higher perceived quality of community-level leadership, but they simultaneously decrease contributions to collective projects outside the CBD program. In addition, although the process encourages more people to run for district-level office and results in more professional political representation, it does not increase aggregate levels of government investment in communities. Ultimately, we find that although the program led to changes in community-level and district-level leadership, it did not increase investment in public goods and did not improve socio-economic outcomes.