Inequality, Participation, and the Design of Local Development Projects: Experimental Evidence

各国政府和捐助者往往优先考虑让当地人民参与低收入和中等收入地区发展项目的设计和执行。然而，在实践中，广泛的参与似乎很难实现，因为它往往不成比例地偏向相对富裕的社区成员、历史上占主导地位的群体成员和男性。这种不平等对发展项目的有效性是一种威胁，因为这种不平等会使地方发展优先事项对边缘化社区成员的需求反应较慢。这一项目产生了新的证据，说明如何设计发展项目，使其更具包容性和参与性。这项研究旨在了解公民对参与性发展项目的偏好，并确定有助于降低因经济地位、族裔或性别而被边缘化的参与者参与门槛的具体项目特点。这些调查结果对有意在自己的参与性方案中解决不平等问题的政府和非政府组织具有直接的可操作性。研究小组与当地、国家和国际开发组织合作，共同制定研究方案，并确保研究结果反馈到开发实践中。该项目还为来自不同背景的美国多所大学的学生提供培训和专业经验。该项目为现有的参与行为和发展机构的社会科学工作做出贡献。具体地说，这项研究提供了新的理论和证据，说明了导致不平等参与的项目的体制特征，以及形成参与动机和动机的项目。一系列实验测试了项目特点对参与与自然资源治理和清洁(水、环境卫生和个人卫生)有关的项目的决策的影响，特别是在边缘人群中。实验数据辅以关于研究参与者参与决策的观察数据，使研究团队能够探索背景因素如何调节项目特征的影响，社区内和社区之间的影响差异有多大，以及研究结果如何在地区背景下复制。最后，在提供实验结果背后的因果机制的数据时，研究团队可以证明参与是由物质和非物质动机驱动的。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Governments and donors often prioritize the participation of local people in the design and implementation of development projects in low- and middle-income regions. In practice, however, broad participation appears difficult to achieve because it is often disproportionately skewed toward relatively wealthy community members, members of historically dominant groups, and men. This inequality is a threat to the effectiveness of development projects because such inequality can make local development priorities less responsive to the needs of marginalized community members. This project generates new evidence regarding how development projects can be designed to be more inclusive and participatory. The research seeks to understand citizens’ preferences regarding participatory development projects, and to identify specific project features that help to lower the barriers to participation among participants who are marginalized based on their economic status, ethnicity, or gender. These findings are directly actionable for governments and non-governmental organizations interested in addressing issues of inequality in their own participatory programs. The research team engages with local, national, and international development organizations to co-produce the research protocols and ensure that the findings feed back into development practice. The project also provides training and professional experiences to students from diverse backgrounds at multiple U.S. universities.The project contributes to existing social science work on participation behavior and development institutions. Specifically, the study provides new theory and evidence regarding the institutional features of projects that elicit unequal participation, and that shape incentives and motivations to participate. A series of experiments test the effects of project features on decisions to participate in projects related to natural resource governance and WaSH (water, sanitation, and hygiene), especially among marginalized populations. The experimental data, supplemented with observational data on study participants’ participation decisions, allow the research team to explore how contextual factors moderate the effects of the project features, how much the effects vary within and across communities, and how the findings replicate across regional contexts. Finally, in providing data on the causal mechanisms underlying the experimental results, the research team can show that participation is driven by both material and non-material motivations.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.