LOCALIZING DEVELOPMENT: DOES PARTICIPATION WORK?
In more competitive subdistricts in Indonesia, the set of projects submitted and funded had larger community contributions, a more pro-poor allocation of project benefits, and lower unit costs.
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in the northern areas of Pakistan that had more educated leaders, and leaders who were actively engaged in community affairs, were better maintained.24 Mansuri (2012a) finds that after controlling for participation (that is, facilitation by the NRSP), inequality does not affect project maintenance much. However, projects were far better maintained in communities with above average levels of schooling. The impact of inequality on construction quality is different, however. The quality of construction of NRSP-supported projects worsens significantly in villages that are more unequal, and this effect is amplified when projects are also more technically complex or are built on older preexisting (usually government-provided) projects. The study thus shows that although participation appears to dampen opportunities for rent-seeking, greater effort is required to ensure the quality of projects in more unequal communities. A number of large participatory development programs use some form of interjurisdictional competition to improve community incentives to allocate funds in a more transparent and equitable manner. Grant funds from the central government can also induce competition across localities if they are tied to the achievement of specific outcomes, reform processes, and so forth. Chavis (2009) is perhaps the only study that has looked at the impact of competition on the quality of infrastructure subprojects. The study used administrative data from the Indonesian Kecamatan Development Program (KDP), funded by the World Bank. Like other communitydriven development programs, KDP involves communities in the allocation of funds for the construction of local public goods. In the KDP, each funded kecamatan (subdistrict) receives a block grant, based on population. The grants are allocated at the village level by a competitive process of project selection that is managed by an intervillage council with representation from each village. As a result, subdistricts with more villages face a greater competition for funds. Chavis proposes that this competitive pressure is plausibly exogenous and that it changes the process by which the block grant is allocated, inducing greater compliance with KDP rules and thus higher-quality projects in more competitive subdistricts.25 He tests this hypothesis using administrative data on more than 3,000 road project proposals received in a single year (road projects typically account for almost half of all KDP subproject funds). The results indicate that in more competitive subdistricts, the set of