A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR PARTICIPATORY DEVELOPMENT
local government. In the absence of Kerala’s well-developed democratic and participatory traditions, it is unlikely that the people’s campaign would have worked. To fully understand the nature of a failure of collective action, it is thus important to understand how context, history, and culture shape the nature of cooperative infrastructure. The local history of a community shapes the norms that have evolved to facilitate collective action, the extent to which such norms exclude women or disadvantaged groups, and whether those norms are transferrable. Local collective action norms may be effective enough to manage water resources, for instance, but not school management. Similarly, the history and evolution of the national government—the extent to which it supports an active civic culture and has an effective legal system and democratic systems—has deep implications for the success of efforts to foster local participation. Culture and civic identity. Coordinating civic action at the local level is also affected by the formation of collective identity—which, in many societies, has been consciously shaped to facilitate cooperation. In a small, ethnically homogenous community, intermarriage may have forged strong ties across families.8 In some instances, such ties could result in common preferences and strong deference to the views of traditional authority figures. More generally, a common cultural identity helps individuals anticipate how others in the group will react to their actions, greatly facilitating collective action. State policy can forge a common cultural identity and common preferences. For instance, the state can actively create a communitarian national identity by introducing notions of cooperation into the constitution; symbols of the state, such as the flag or pledges of allegiance; and school curricula. One way of thinking about how culture and civic identity affect the capacity for collective action is by thinking about the formation of what Rao (2008) calls “symbolic public goods.” Rao builds on the work of Chwe (1999, 2001), who demonstrates how collective action needs to distinguish between structure and strategy. Chwe’s basic argument goes as follows. Most models of collective action assume, implicitly, some preexisting “common knowledge.” When a group of individuals plays a collective action game, whether static or dynamic, it is assumed that individual A knows the payoffs, information sets, costs, incentives, possible moves, and so forth faced by individual B. Individual B, in
To fully understand the nature of a failure of collective action, it is important to understand how context, history, and culture shape the nature of cooperative infrastructure.
69