Initial Conditions Matter: Social Capital and Participatory Development Lisa Cameron, Susan Olivia and Manisha Shah PWP-CCPR-2016-007 February 12, 2016 California Center for Population Research On-Line Working Paper Series Initial Conditions Matter: Social Capital and Participatory Development∗ Lisa Cameron Susan Olivia Monash University Monash University
[email protected] [email protected] Manisha Shah University of California, Los Angeles and NBER
[email protected] December 2015 Abstract Billions of dollars have been spent on participatory development programs in the developing world. These programs give community members an active decision-making role. Given the emphasis on community involvement, one might expect that the ef- fectiveness of this approach would depend on communities' pre-existing social capital stocks. Using data from a large randomized field experiment of Community-Led Total Sanitation in Indonesia, we find that villages with high initial social capital built toilets and reduced open defecation, resulting in substantial health benefits. In villages with low initial stocks of social capital, the approach was counterproductive|fewer toilets were built than in control communities and social capital suffered. JEL Codes: O12, O22, I15. ∗We are grateful to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for funding the initial impact evaluation which provides the baseline and endline data, and the Australian Research Council for funding the social capital module (ARC Discovery Project DP0987011). We would like to thank Joseph Cummins, John Strauss, and participants at seminars at the University of Southern California, Georgetown University and the World Bank for helpful comments. 1 Introduction Participatory development (PD) strategies seek to engage local populations in development projects.