Community-driven development and social capital : evidence from Morocco

Abstract

Community-driven development programs rest on the principle of development aid through active community participation. Their demand-driven and bottom-up nature of decision making is expected to promote pro-social behaviors. This paper studies the impact of one such program in rural Morocco on social capital. We use behavioral experiments in the field to measure social capital among households living in communes with and without the policy intervention. Using a regression discontinuity framework, we find that community-driven development has a positive but weak impact on public goods contribution. This public responsibility increases with treatment intensity as proxied by the amount of total project spending. While the program has no effect on altruism, evidence seems to suggest that it reduces interpersonal trust. These mixed results signal that social capital responds rather slowly, if at all, to a shift from a centralized to a more localized decision-making process.