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

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，广泛参与似乎很难实现，因为它往往不成比例地偏向于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构成威胁，因为这种不平等可能使地方发展优先事项无法满足边缘化社区成员的需求。该项目为如何设计更具包容性和参与性的发展项目提供了新的证据。该研究旨在了解公民对参与式发展项目的偏好，并确定有助于降低因经济地位、种族或性别而被边缘化的参与者参与的障碍的具体项目特征。这些发现对于有意在其参与性项目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。研究小组与地方、国家和国际发展组织合作，共同制定研究方案，并确保研究结果反馈到发展实践中。该项目还为来自美国多所大学的不同背景的学生提供培训和专业经验。该项目有助于现有的关于参与行为和发展机构的社会科学工作。具体而言，该研究为项目的制度特征提供了新的理论和证据，这些特征引发了不平等的参与，并形成了参与的激励和动机。一系列实验测试了项目特征对参与自然资源治理和WaSH（水、环境卫生和个人卫生）项目决策的影响，特别是在边缘化人群中。实验数据，辅以研究参与者参与决策的观察数据，使研究小组能够探索环境因素如何调节项目特征的影响，影响在社区内部和跨社区之间的差异有多大，以及研究结果如何在区域背景下复制。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。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识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.