Mobilization, Participatory Planning Institutions, and Elite Capture: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Rural Kenya

Summary. -This paper examines the linkage between mobilization and elite capture in participatory institutions using a randomized experiment in Kenya. In the treatment group, an environmental organization mobilized individuals to attend a participatory local government planning meeting. Mobilization had a large and significant effect on citizen participation. Despite this effect, mobilization did not lead to increased adoption of either the organization's preferred projects or the projects requested by citizens. Instead, the intervention changes the type of discrepancies observed in final allocations, indicating that elite control over planning institutions can adapt to increased mobilization and participation

Institutions and Local Public Goods Maintenance: Ethnographic and Experimental Evidence from Rural Kenya

In recent years, a large literature has provided an array of evidence attempting to explain variation in the availability of local public goods. Despite the theoretical and empirical contributions of this literature, there are two persistent puzzles that cannot be explained by existing approaches. First, research on local public goods focuses almost exclusively on explaining whether or not public goods are provided. However, what this focus overlooks is that in many cases where local public goods are provided, there is often variation in the extent to which these goods are maintained over time. Why are some communities able to maintain the viability of local public goods over time, while others are not? Second, existing studies typically only focus on one type of institution when explaining public goods provision. One body of research focuses on how political institutions shape public goods provision by governments, while a separate literature focuses instead on how community-level institutions allow groups of citizens to overcome collective action problems and provide local public goods themselves. Despite this tendency in the literature, public goods outcomes are frequently jointly produced by state and community institutions. How do interactions between institutions shape public goods maintenance outcomes over time? This study develops a theory that attempts to explain these patterns and puzzles associated with the maintenance of local public goods by explicitly examining how both state and community institutions in a given locality interact with one another over time. The core of the theory is the idea that maintaining a local public good over time entails two distinct problems: i) the dynamic provision problem, which is based in the incentive of individuals to free-ride on the provision of the public good over time and 2) the harmful action problem, which is based in the incentive of individuals to take actions that benefit themselves, but degrade local public goods. Stable maintenance of local public goods entails creating institutions that can solve both types of problem. States and communities can both create institutions that solve both of these problems, but these institutions do not act in isolation. In particular, community institutions that provide public goods and prevent harmful action rely on shared social norms and direct, multiplex, and stable social networks. If new institutions complement local norms and networks, public goods will be maintained durably over time, but institutional interventions that either conflict with local norms or undermine local collective action will either lead to degradation of local public goods over time or more costly investments in public goods maintenance by governments. I test the implications of this theory using qualitative and quantitative evidence from a case study of a public sanitation program that I designed and implemented in the Laikipia region of Kenya in 2007 and 2008. The empirical analysis proceeds in three parts. First, I use interviews, participant-observation, and archival data to map the local institutional diversity in Laikipia, finding that although a wide variety of state and community institutions solve many public goods problems, none of these institutions are harnessed to maintain public sanitation in the region. Second, I utilize this institutional diversity as the basis for a large-scale field experiment that randomly assigned a waste management and anti-littering program to three different institutional arrangements that incorporated different mixes and types of state and community institutions. The major findings from this experiment are consistent with the theory developed in this study-localities in which there was no explicit punishment for littering experienced more sustained reductions in public waste and littering behavior vis-a-vis localities in which government bureaucrats could punish littering and localities in which traditional leaders could punish littering. Furthermore, survey evidence indicates that this difference is driven in part by lower rates of community clean-ups in localities assigned to one of the two treatments with rules allowing the punishment of littering

Replication Data for: Sheely, Ryan. 2015. “Mobilization, Participatory Planning Institutions, and Elite Capture”.

Replication Data for: Sheely, Ryan. 2015. “Mobilization, Participatory Planning Institutions, and Elite Capture”. World Development 67. This paper examines the linkage between mobilization and elite capture in participatory institutions using a randomized experiment in Kenya. In the treatment group, an environmental organization mobilized individuals to attend a participatory local government planning meeting. Mobilization had a large and significant effect on citizen participation. Despite this effect, mobilization did not lead to increased adoption of either the organization’s preferred projects or the projects requested by citizens. Instead, the intervention changes the type of discrepancies observed in final allocations, indicating that elite control over planning institutions can adapt to increased mobilization and participation

Unlocking the Potential of Participatory Planning: How Flexible and Adaptive Governance Interventions Can Work in Practice

The past two decades have witnessed the rapid diffusion of participatory planning models, including Community Driven Development and Participatory Budgeting. Despite enormous funding outlays, studies paint a mixed picture about whether and when these programs ‘work’ to improve welfare, governance, or social change. To better understand these questions, our paper takes an in-depth approach to understanding the sub-national application of a single participatory planning intervention implemented across Northern Kenya, using qualitative process tracing to understand the mechanisms operating across five counties. Our findings suggest the potential for participatory planning interventions to succeed is contingent on three factors which are insufficiently understood by both practitioners and academics. 1) At the institutional level, participatory planning interventions need to address genuine governance gaps by fulfilling functions that are not met by formal or informal institutions. 2) The rule-based design of participatory institutions often requires adaptation at the sub-national level in response to contextual factors, and the success of this adaptation mediates whether rules function as intended. 3) Ground-level implementers exercise far more discretion than officially recognized during implementation, suggesting they function as a poorly understood source of variation between and within programs

Chlorine Dispensers in Kenya: Scaling for Results

Dofiles and ready-for-analysis data used in the analysis published in the Final Report to 3ie on the project, "Chlorine Dispensers in Kenya: Scaling for Results" (project code OW1.29). This project was funded as part of the First Open Window round. (2018-05-14

The public hearing and law-making procedures

This article examines the institution of the public hearing in contemporary constitutional systems. After considering the public hearing in light of the concept of deliberative democracy, the authors present various normative and practical measures implemented in selected countries. It is claimed that public deliberation affects the quality of legislation and makes it more legitimate. The public hearing as a stage in the legislative procedure requires a mature reciprocal dialogue between individuals and the state authorities as well as a readiness to reach appropriate decisions. The authors argue that to make the public hearing more effective, the law-maker or its organs should have a duty to inform the opinion about the extent to which the public proposals have been taken into account