LOCALIZING DEVELOPMENT: DOES PARTICIPATION WORK?
Community engagement in Pakistan substantially improved project maintenance . . . . . . but only when participation was confined to the nontechnical aspects of the project. Community involvement in technical decisions was detrimental.
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facilitation, substantially improved project maintenance (the main outcome of interest) but only when participation was confined to the nontechnical aspects of the project. When communities got involved in technical project decisions, participation was detrimental. The intuition behind this claim is that decisions requiring local information are more likely to be sensitive to the community’s investment, whereas decisions that require technical information should be more responsive to the external agency’s investment. Second, communities were less able to maintain projects that were technically complex or new.19 They did better when preexisting projects were refurbished or the project selected was one in which they had previous experience. Third, inequality in the incidence of project benefits (across both participatory and government provided projects) has a U-shaped effect on maintenance. As inequlity in the distribution of project benefits increases, maintenance levels first fall then rise.20 As Khwaja notes, under perfect inequality in the distribution of benefits, the project is effectively privatized, and maintenance no longer requires any coordination. 21 This U-shaped relationship between inequality and project maintenance is similar to the tradeoff between resource sustainability and wealth inequality in the literature on common pool resources. Mansuri (2012a) uses data from the three largest provinces of Pakistan to provide further insights on the relationship between participation and project quality. Her study combines administrative, census, and survey data from 230 infrastructure projects in 80 villages.22 About half of the projects were constructed by government line departments; while the rest were built by the community with support from the National Rural Support Program (NRSP).23 The study assesses two aspects of project quality: design and construction, and current condition and maintenance. The first aspect, provides evidence of capture, in the narrow sense of theft and corruption, in construction, while the second reflects a communities’ capacity for coordination and is therefore more comparable with Khwaja’s (2004, 2009) work. Compared with the northern areas, the rest of Pakistan has far greater levels of local inequality and ethnic heterogeneity. Land ownership, which is almost entirely hereditary, is extremely skewed, with the top 5 percent of landowners owning more than 40 percent of all land while more than half of rural households are landless. The caste (zaat) structure is also extremely hierarchical. Given these features, Mansuri’s findings are encouraging.