LOCALIZING DEVELOPMENT: HAS THE PARTICIPATORY APPROACH WORKED? Ghazala Mansuri and Vijayendra Rao

Table of Contents  Chapter 1: Conceptual Foundations: Civil Society Failure and Local Development  Chapter 2: Generating Hypotheses: Context, Classification and Trajectories  Chapter 3: Does Participation Improve Development Outcomes?  Chapter 4: Cultivating Participation and Improving Governance: Challenges of Equity, Politics and Sustainability  Chapter 5: Lessons for Policy

Chapter 1: Conceptual Foundations: Overview  Local Participatory Development: Local Decentralization Community Based Development  Funding for Community Based Development- $32 Billion Over the last Decade  Rose for 5% in 1989 to 25% of all lending in  About $25 Billion for village decentralization  Justification: Empowering the Poor Building “social capital” Improving “demand-side” of governance

Framework Failures- Imperfections  Information  Coordination  Equity

Civil Society Failure  Internal  Poor Capacity for Collective Action  Elite Capture  Linkages  Information Failures – Lack of Transparency, Electoral Accountability, Access  Coordination Failures – Social Accountability, Access to justice, Lack of Credit and Insurance, Potential for Producer and Consumer Cooperatives  Equity: Unequal access to information, exclusion from collective and electoral processes.

Chapter 2: : Context, Classification and Trajectories  Preferences  Path Dependence  Colonial Rule  Administrative Systems  Institutions  Inequality and Heterogeneity  Policy History - Land Reform, Access to Education  Geography  Social and Cultural Context

Impact on Participation Civil Society Investments Assumed (PDO)ActualImpact on Public Goods and Services Trajectories of Local Participation

What are the outcomes of interest?  Participation  Services  Poverty  “Governance” - What impact do you expect to see when?

Monitoring  Process – Qualitative Tracking  Real Time Learning  Experiments within project cycle  Evaluations for Learning not for judgment  Indonesia Example

Policy Messages  Important to think through end goals and trajectories What elements of the context matter for end goals Understanding which linkages matter Understanding challenges to collective action and inclusion and explicitly accounting for them in design and implementation Participatory institutions that have “teeth” are more likely to succeed. What is the timeline  Monitoring of process remains critical  Participatory projects require the continuing involvement of external agencies and governments