Paper
Fearon, James D., Macartan Humphreys, and Jeremy M. Weinstein (2015). American Political Science Review, 109(3): 450–469
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In one paragraph
Donors spend heavily on “community-driven development” on the belief that it strengthens communities’ ability to solve collective-action problems, especially after conflict. The authors use the random assignment of a UK-funded, IRC-implemented community-driven reconstruction programme across 83 communities in northern Liberia (2006–08) to test this. Measured through a “matching funds” public-goods game, treated communities did cooperate more — but only when the game was played by mixed groups of men and women. Where only women took part, there was no effect, plausibly because women could draw on traditional institutions the programme never touched.
Setting and question
Post-conflict Liberia, where the programme combined block grants with efforts to build local governance. The question: can an external intervention change something as deep-rooted as a community’s capacity to cooperate?
Data and identification
Random assignment of 42 of 83 eligible communities to the programme; outcomes from household surveys and from a behavioural measure — a community-level matching-funds game in which contributions were topped up by the project. The paper is a good case study in measuring a latent concept (cooperation capacity) with a game instead of self-reports, and in pre-specified heterogeneity analysis.
Main results
Higher contributions in treated communities when both men and women faced the collective-action problem; no effect in women-only play. The authors read the mechanism as improved mobilisation capacity for mixed-gender problems.
Why it is on the reading list
It shows an RCT where the outcome measure is itself an experiment, and where heterogeneity by game design carries the substantive conclusion. Compare the measurement strategy with the survey-based approach of Banerjee, Deaton & Duflo (2004).
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