How Political Insiders Lose Out When International Aid Underperforms: Evidence from a Participatory Development Experiment in G

Dean Karlan, Katharine Baldwin, Christopher Udry and Ernest Appiah

No 14537, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: Participatory development is designed to mitigate problems of political bias in pre-existing local government but also interacts with it in complex ways. Using a five-year randomized controlled study in 97 clusters of villages (194 villages) in Ghana, we analyze the effects of a major participatory development program on participation in, leadership of and investment by preexisting political institutions, and on households’ overall socioeconomic well-being. Applying theoretical insights on political participation and redistributive politics, we consider the possibility of both cross-institutional mobilization and displacement, and heterogeneous effects by partisanship. We find the government and its political supporters acted with high expectations for the participatory approach: treatment led to increased participation in local governance and reallocation of resources. But the results did not meet expectations, resulting in a worsening of socioeconomic wellbeing in treatment versus control villages for government supporters. This demonstrates international aid’s complex distributional consequences.

Keywords: Participatory development; Political economy; International aid; Distributive politics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H4 H7 O12 O17 O19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-ore
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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