DOES PARTICIPATION IMPROVE DEVELOPMENT OUTCOMES?
Pradhan and others (2011) study an intervention aimed at strengthening school committees in Indonesia. They find that measures that increased linkages between schools and local government officials were the most effective in improving schooling outcomes and the legitimacy of the participatory process, particularly when combined with better accountability of the school committees themselves through open elections. In contrast, interventions that provided funds and training to incumbent school committee members had no effect. Moreover, even the most effective intervention (election with linkage) did not alter parental willingness to invest time or resources in the school committee though it did increase the amount of time parents devoted to homework, by about 80 minutes a week.34 A number of intermediate outcomes also improved. Specifically, the election intervention improved perceptions of school committee effectiveness by teachers, suggesting that elections may improve legitimacy. Elections also improved teacher motivation and effort. Elections alone increased teaching time by 0.63 hours a day, mostly in lesson preparation time. Elections plus linkage increased daily teaching time by 1.1 hours, mostly in time spent grading. The proportion of teachers observed in the classroom at the time of the survey decreased with the election intervention, however, which is puzzling. The authors also find no impact on student dropout or repetition rates in any arm, although they find some improvement in student learning in the linkage and election plus linkage arms. The results from a companion qualitative study suggest an interesting tension. On the one hand, school committees appreciated receiving grants that were directly under their control and reported this control as the impetus for more face-to-face dialogue with the community. On the other hand, the grants seem to have resulted in greater conflict between the school committee and the principal (as might be expected). There were also some challenges in implementing elections, with school committees resisting changes in membership. When elections were conducted as designed, however, they enhanced community awareness and participation in school committee activities and legitimized the committee. Simply providing training to incumbent committee members had little effect, either qualitatively or quantitatively. The key finding in this study is that the linkage process created a partnership between the school committee and the village
In Indonesia, partnership between school committees and village councils resulted in concrete actions by the village council and significant impacts that school committees could not have achieved alone.
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