Inequality, Participation, and the Design of Local Development Projects: Experimental Evidence

Governments and donors often prioritize the participation of local people in the design and implementation of development projects in low- and middle-income regions. In practice, however, broad participation appears difficult to achieve because it is often disproportionately skewed toward relatively wealthy community members, members of historically dominant groups, and men. This inequality is a threat to the effectiveness of development projects because such inequality can make local development priorities less responsive to the needs of marginalized community members. This project generates new evidence regarding how development projects can be designed to be more inclusive and participatory. The research seeks to understand citizens’ preferences regarding participatory development projects, and to identify specific project features that help to lower the barriers to participation among participants who are marginalized based on their economic status, ethnicity, or gender. These findings are directly actionable for governments and non-governmental organizations interested in addressing issues of inequality in their own participatory programs. The research team engages with local, national, and international development organizations to co-produce the research protocols and ensure that the findings feed back into development practice. The project also provides training and professional experiences to students from diverse backgrounds at multiple U.S. universities. The project contributes to existing social science work on participation behavior and development institutions. Specifically, the study provides new theory and evidence regarding the institutional features of projects that elicit unequal participation, and that shape incentives and motivations to participate. A series of experiments test the effects of project features on decisions to participate in projects related to natural resource governance and WaSH (water, sanitation, and hygiene), especially among marginalized populations. The experimental data, supplemented with observational data on study participants’ participation decisions, allow the research team to explore how contextual factors moderate the effects of the project features, how much the effects vary within and across communities, and how the findings replicate across regional contexts. Finally, in providing data on the causal mechanisms underlying the experimental results, the research team can show that participation is driven by both material and non-material motivations. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.