Building Ownership of Development Policy: Evidence from an RCT in Kenya

• In Event: Political Economy in Africa

Abstract

Citizen participation in government decision-making has been widely promoted as a method for improving sustainable development outcomes. Participatory budgeting is one of the most popular ways to engage the public in policy making. These programs have spread rapidly across the Global South but have rarely been evaluated. Participatory budgeting has been lauded as a program that empowers the poor and marginalized groups but also criticized for being prone to elite capture. Actual outcomes related to inequality likely depend both on the broader political context within which participation occurs, as well as the specific procedures that are used to encourage and structure participation. Within the context of participatory budgeting in rural Kenya (which represents a ‘hard test’ of hypotheses surrounding the benefits of participation), we randomly assign three different commonly used group decision making procedures to select development projects at the village level, which are then implemented in each village. In this paper, we compare these treatments across villages in terms of the willingness of residents to participate in a community work-day surrounding development projects as well as long-term individual satisfaction with decision-making and heterogenous treatment effects across gender and leadership status. These analyses represent our first step toward assessing the extent to which these differing participatory designs succeed at building perceptions of ownership, promoting collective action to maintain the projects, and, by extension, promoting sustainable development in a rural, low-income context.

Authors

• Tara Grillos, Purdue University

• Michael Touchton, University of Miami