CAREER: Culture, Context, and Development Policy: An Interdisciplinary Research and Training Program

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This CAREER proposal uses four projects to study how culture interacts with policy to affect development outcomes. Culture has important implications for a wide variety of outcomes, including governance, human capital investment, and the scope and extent of cooperation. Economists have sought to understand the drivers of variation in culture, and the consequences of various cultural practices for key economic outcomes. The theme of this CAREER project is that insights from anthropology, culture, and local context can help explain differences in development policy success across countries and if appropriately used, may improve the design and effectiveness of development policies. The first project studies how to improve accountability and performance of local leaders; the second studies how a mismatch between indigenous institutions and development initiatives hinders the success of such initiatives, while the third project studies how social structures affect insurance and cooperation. The final project digitizes a new, large, and innovative ethnographic data for many developing countries that will be one of the few data sets of its kind. The results of this project will improve the efficiency of development policies, hence reduce poverty around the world. In addition, the results will help improve the effectiveness of US foreign aid programs, hence help the US maintain its global leadership in poverty reduction.The research consists of four projects to study how culture interacts with policy to explain the heterogeneity in development outcomes across countries as well as contribute to the literature in evolutionary anthropology. The projects combine a variety of methods: randomized controlled trials, lab-in-the-field experiments, original surveys, and digitization of archival and ethnographic data. The first project uses RCT to investigate whether social structures that increase accountability of local leaders can be leveraged to improve the provision of public goods. The second project provides new evidence on the ecological origins of private, relative to communal, land rights and explores how traditional property rights structures affect efforts to title land. The third project studies how matrilineal kinship systems affect cooperation and insurance in the extended family, expanding the traditional focus within economics on the nuclear family to extended kinship. The fourth project is an innovative data digitization effort to provide access to new ethnographic data for several developing countries. The results of these projects will provide insight into how culture affects the efficacy of development policy, and how greater understanding of local context can improve development initiatives. Besides improving development policy outcomes, the results will also help improve the effectiveness of US foreign aid.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.