Informal Political Elites and Environmental Service Provision after Conflict

• In Event: Experimental Methods in Global Environmental Politics

Abstract

Environmental services such as solid waste management play a crucial role in uplifting human well-being and strengthening political stability after conflict ends. Recognizing this, post-conflict governments often form private-public partnerships (PPPs) to overcome the economic legacies of conflict that otherwise hamstring environmental service provision, such as poor infrastructure. However, the advantages PPPs offer may fail to improve access to environmental services if they result in models of service provision the public is unwilling to engage with given the political legacies of conflict, such as fragmented state-society relations. The public may perceive PPPs as extensions of a government they do not trust, or they may perceive PPPs’ services as illegitimate because they do not align with the informal modes of environmental service provision that emerged in the absence of the state. Securing the endorsement of informal political elites who govern locally without statutory authority (e.g., traditional chiefs) may mitigate these challenges. Extant research demonstrates how informal political elites can enhance democratic accountability, thereby facilitating public engagement with governments citizens otherwise are aggrieved by, distrust, or perceive as illegitimate. This research investigates whether those capacities extend to the PPPs post-conflict governments often adopt to deliver environmental services.

We embed a conjoint experiment in an ongoing survey deployed across 2100 households in Monrovia’s capital city of Liberia to test whether securing the endorsement of informal political elites called “community chairpeople” shapes public preferences for garbage collection services provided through a PPP. Community chairpeople are local leaders who govern without statutory authority and emerged during the Liberian civil wars to coordinate public service provision and oversee communal dispute resolution. There are three notable features of our conjoint experiment and survey. First, both were developed in partnership with the city government of Monrovia, which seeks to reform its ongoing PPP for providing household garbage collection services through “community-based enterprises” (CBEs) it licenses. Second, the conjoint experiment’s attributes include determinants of the public’s engagement with CBEs other than the endorsement of community chairpeople: their price, their requirements for waste separation, their willingness to hire workers from the communities they serve, and how their operations affect the city government’s ability to enforce existing laws about illegal garbage dumping. We identify these attributes through interviews and workshops with staff at the city government of Monrovia and a series of focus group discussions in communities where CBEs services are presently available but infrequently used. Third, our survey collects data on other factors likely to moderate the relationship between a chairperson’s endorsement and a respondent’s preferences for CBE-provided garbage collection services, such as how corrupt respondents perceive their chairpeople and the city government of Monrovia to be. Data collection will conclude March 2024.

Authors

• Patrick Hunnicutt, Chapman University

• Kou Gbaintor-Johnson, Center for Action Research and Training