International Interventions to Build Social Capital : Evidence from a Field Experiment in Sudan
Over the past decade the international community, especially the World Bank, has conducted programs to increase local public service delivery in developing countries by improving local governing institutions and creating social capital. This paper...
Main Authors: | , |
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Format: | Policy Research Working Paper |
Language: | English en_US |
Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2014
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Subjects: | |
Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2014/02/18924896/international-interventions-build-social-capital-evidence-field-experiment-sudan http://hdl.handle.net/10986/17311 |
Summary: | Over the past decade the international
community, especially the World Bank, has conducted programs
to increase local public service delivery in developing
countries by improving local governing institutions and
creating social capital. This paper evaluates one such
program in Sudan to answer the question: Can the
international community change the grassroots civic culture
of developing countries to increase social capital? The
paper offers three contributions. First, it uses
lab-in-the-field measures to focus on the effects of the
program on pro-social preferences without the confounding
influence of any program- induced changes on local governing
institutions. Second, it tests whether the program led to
denser social networks in recipient communities. Based on
these two measures, the effect of the program was a
precisely estimated zero. However, in a retrospective
survey, respondents from program communities characterized
their behavior as being more pro-social and their
communities more socially cohesive. This leads to a third
contribution of the paper: it provides evidence for the
hypothesis, stated by several scholars in the literature,
that retrospective survey measures of social capital over
biased evidence of a positive effect of these programs.
Regardless of one's faith in retrospective
self-reported survey measures, the results clearly point to
zero impact of the program on pro-social preferences and
social network density. Therefore, if the increase in
self-reported behaviors is accurate, it must be because of
social sanctions that enforce compliance with pro-social
norms through mechanisms other than the social networks that
were measured. |
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