Maintaining Local Public Goods: Evidence from Rural Kenya Ryan Sheely CID Working Paper No. 273 November 2013 Copyright 2013 Sheely, Ryan, and the President and Fellows of Harvard College Working Papers Center for International Development at Harvard University Maintaining Local Public Goods: Evidence from Rural Kenya Ryan Sheely! Assistant Professor of Public Policy Harvard Kennedy School of Government 79 John F. Kennedy St., Mailbox 66 Cambridge, MA 02138
[email protected] Abstract: Political Scientists have produced a substantial body of theory and evidence that explains variation in the availability of local public goods in developing countries. Existing research cannot explain variation in how these goods are maintained over time. I develop a theory that explains how the interactions between government and community institutions shape public goods maintenance. I test the implications of this theory using a qualitative case study and a randomized field experiment that assigns communities participating in a waste management program in rural Kenya to three different institutional arrangements. I find that localities with no formal punishments for littering experienced sustained reductions in littering behavior and increases in the frequency of public clean-ups. In contrast, communities in which government administrators or traditional leaders could punish littering experienced short-term reductions in littering behavior that were not sustained over time. Word Count: 11,963 (including footnotes, tables, and bibliography) *Acknowledgements: Many thanks to Bill Clark, Michael Kremer, Asim Khwaja, Tarek Masoud, Steve Levitsky, Bob Bates, Archon Fung, Esther Mwangi, Elinor Ostrom, Chris Blattman, Stathis Kalyvas, Evan Lieberman, Beatriz Magaloni, Alberto Diaz-Cayeros, Greg Huber, Don Green, Vivek Sharma, Paolo Spada, Abbey Steel, David Patel, Mali Ole Kaunga, and seminar participants at Yale, Harvard, NYU, MIT, Princeton, Indiana University, and Freie University for comments on earlier versions of this paper.