Community-Based Targeting Mechanisms for Social Safety Nets: A Critical Review

By Jonathan Conning, Michael Kevane. 2002

374 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper interprets case studies and theory on community involvement in beneficiary selection and benefit delivery for social safety nets. Several considerations should be carefully balanced in assessing the advantages of using community groups as targeting agents. First, gains from utilizing local information and social capital may be eroded by costly rent-seeking. Second, the potential improvement in targeting criteria from incorporating local notions of deprivation must be tempered by the possibility of program capture by local elites, and by the possibility that local preferences are not pro-poor. Third, intended outcomes may be undermined by unforeseen strategic targeting by local communities in response to national funding and evaluation criteria, or by declines in political support.

Subfields: Gender Studies, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/14721cfef9cb5b3903dce040d604ac75d23b9c7e

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Citations in the corpus

The Risk of Resource Misappropriation in Community-Driven Development (2003, background): “based village societies in which landed elites use their dominant economic, social, and political position to appropriate for themselves whatever portion of the resources that they need and to let the poor have the leftovers only (Conning and Kevane, 2002; Galasso and Ravallion, forthcoming; Bardhan”
The Targeting of Transfers in Developing Countries: Review of Experience and Lessons (2004, background): “Our sample is only a fraction of the studies listed in Conning and Kevane (2002); it could well be that only successful interventions using community targeting have been well documented.”
For Reducing Poverty Faster: Target Reasons Before People (2007, background): “…danger is that this knowledge may not be appropriately utilized; in fact, inequality within a village may actually worsen if local elites capture processes of decision making and benefit allocation (Conning & Kevane, 2002; Galasso & Ravallion, 2002; Pender & Ruben, 2004; Platteau & Abraham, 2002).”
Community-Based Development and Poverty Alleviation: an Evaluation of China's Poor Village Investment Program (2010, neutral): “Concerns over capture are magnified in developing country settings where information and monitoring systems as well as local democracy or other forms of local accountability are often weak (Conning and Kevane, 2002).”
Poverty reduction as a local institutional process (2005, background): “(Bromley, 1998, p. 87) An evident and already well-documented problem is that of capture of development aid either by a landed, ‘‘traditional’’ elite (Conning & Kevane, 2002; Platteau & Abraham, 2002; Platteau & Gaspart, 2003) or by ‘‘downsized’’ state bureaucrats who have reappeared as…”
Extending Social Security: Policies for Developing Countries (2003, background): “In a thorough overview of community-based targeting mechanisms Conning and Kevane (2002) come to three conclusions.”
Community-Based Risk Management Arrangements: A Review (2010, background): “For example, as discussed by Mansuri and Rao (2004) and Conning and Kevane (2002), these arrangements are often vulnerable to capture by local elites.”
The targeting effectiveness of social transfers (2017, background): “(Conning and Kevane 2002, 381) In short, either communities identify beneficiaries based on criteria predefined by administrators (‘delegated community-based targeting’), or communities select beneficiaries based on their own criteria (‘devolved community-based targeting’).”