Conducting (Long-term) Impact Evaluations in Humanitarian and Conflict Settings: Evidence from a complex agricultural intervention in Syria

Aysegül Kayaoglu, Ghassan Baliki () and Tilman Brück ()
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Aysegül Kayaoglu: ISDC - International Security and Development Center, Germany; Department of Economics, Istanbul Technical University, Türkiye; IMIS, University of Osnabrück, Germany
Ghassan Baliki: ISDC - International Security and Development Center, Germany
Tilman Brück: Humboldt-University of Berlin, Germany; ISDC - International Security and Development Center, Berlin, Germany; Thaer-Institute, Humboldt-University of Berlin, Germany; Leibniz Institute of Vegetable and Ornamental Crops (IGZ), Germany

No 386, HiCN Working Papers from Households in Conflict Network

Abstract: The number of vulnerable people in humanitarian emergencies worldwide is increasing due to the rising frequency and intensity of risk exposure. At the same time, most interventions in humanitarian emergency and conflict settings (HECS) are short-term in nature, as if people only require temporary help to overcome adversity. Yet there is an acute scarcity of rigorous impact evaluations in HECS testing if assistance works well (or at all). Moreover, the few available studies only cover a small range of countries and contexts. Furthermore, the knowledge gap concerning the long-term impacts of crisis interventions is even more pronounced. These gaps are primarily caused by the unavailability of (long-term) panel data in emergencies and by the challenges of constructing feasible counterfactuals. Our paper contributes to the literature in four ways. First, we review recent research on covariate balancing to assist researchers in conducting a rigorous impact evaluation in HECS with non-randomized treatment assignments and significant covariate imbalances between the treatment and control groups due to targeting. We thus suggest methods to overcome the challenges associated with conflict or humanitarian contexts. Second, employing a range of such methods for one case study, we offer rigorous evidence on the long-term causal impacts of agricultural interventions in a humanitarian crisis setting. Third, we show that agricultural or livestock interventions have different impacts in the long term, which implies that the combined interventions might have a more sustainable impact on households. In other words, our analyses demonstrate that short-term humanitarian assistance can indeed have long-term development impacts. Fourth, we offer innovative evidence for the case of Syria, using unique panel data with four waves of treated and untreated households, thus expanding the range of countries ever studied in the literature on humanitarian emergencies.

Keywords: causal inference; matching; entropy balancing; conflict; food security; resilience; agricultural interventions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C18 C3 D1 I31 O13 Q1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 48 pages
Date: 2023-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-des and nep-dev
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hic:wpaper:386

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