Do Community-Driven Development Projects Enhance Social Capital? Evidence from the Philippines

By Julien Labonne, Robert S. Chase. 2008

139 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper explores the social capital impacts of a large-scale, community-driven development project in the Philippines in which communities competed for block grants for infrastructure investment. The analysis uses a unique data set of about 2,100 households collected before the project started (2003) and after one cycle of sub-project implementation (2006) in 66 treatment and 69 matched control communities. Participation in village assemblies, the frequency with which local officials meet with residents and trust towards strangers increased as a result of the project. However, there is a decline in group membership and participation in informal collective action activities. This may have been because households were time-constrained, so that in order to participate in project activities, they needed to temporarily reduce their participation in informal activities. An alternative explanation is that the project improved the efficiency of formal forms of social capital and thus households needed to rely less on informal forms. Finally, the results indicate that, in the short run, the project might have reduced the number of other investments.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Safety Research, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5484b72ae36cc53879571cc1f991c88192bbaa0b

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Citations in the corpus

Reshaping Institutions: Evidence on Aid Impacts Using a Pre-Analysis Plan (2012, background): “Moreover, since 2005, registration of clinical trials is a prerequisite for publication in any member journal of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. There are even further calls in medicine (Lancet 2010) and epidemiology (Bracken 2011) to register protocols for observational stud”
Interventions to promote social cohesion in sub-Saharan Africa (2010, methodology): “…not include an intervention (for instance, Hooghe and Fox 2003, Krishna 2007), used social cohesion as the independent rather than outcome variable (for instance, Easterly et al. 2006, Olken 2007), and/or were not based in sub-Saharan Africa (Attanasio and Phillips 2008, Labonne and Chase 2008).”
Buying votes vs. supplying public services : political incentives to under-invest in pro-poor policies (2013, methodology): “…in communities (using survey measures of a particular institution for local collective action and mutual assistance in the Philippines, described in Labonne and Chase, 2011—participation in bayanihan); whether the mayor is able to claim political affiliation with a larger number of politicians,…”