Understanding the Role of Local Leaders in Crisis Response: Evidence from Mali

• In Event: Experiments in African Politics

Abstract

Local government leaders play a pivotal role as intermediaries between aid organizations and communities given their superior information about affected communities and their proximity and ability to gather real-time data on vulnerabilities and emerging crises. While these local leaders can facilitate the goals of humanitarian organizations by helping reach populations most in need, providing real-time information or even mobilizing complementary resilience efforts, leaders may also undermine their goals by diverting resources to favored groups or representing the needs of ingroup members at the expense of outgroup ones. Our project seeks to understand how variation in the type and severity of the crisis interacts with variation in the type and characteristics of the leader to produce these different outcomes. We do this through a survey of local leaders – elected, appointed, and associational – at the municipal and village level across 125 communes and 500 villages in rural Mali that have experienced a range of economic and security crises. We triangulate information from leaders at these different levels to identify sources of resilience to crises as well as obstacles to recovery. A survey experiment assesses how different leaders make trade-offs across different dimensions of recovery efforts including rent-seeking, the timing of aid distribution, and modalities of distribution. The results will have implications for how new crises could best benefit from humanitarian response and how organizations could tailor their outreach and resource distribution that takes local governance into account.

Authors

• Jessica Gottlieb, University of Houston

• Jaimie Bleck, University of Notre Dame

• Katrina Kosec, IFPRI

• Jordan Kyle, International Food Policy Research Institute