Publication: Do Community-Driven Development Projects Enhance Social Capital? Evidence from the Philippines
Date
2008-07
ISSN
Published
2008-07
Author(s)
Labonne, Julien
Chase, Robert S.
Abstract
This paper explores the social capital
impacts of a large-scale, community-driven development
project in the Philippines in which communities competed for
block grants for infrastructure investment. The analysis
uses a unique data set of about 2,100 households collected
before the project started (2003) and after one cycle of
sub-project implementation (2006) in 66 treatment and 69
matched control communities. Participation in village
assemblies, the frequency with which local officials meet
with residents and trust towards strangers increased as a
result of the project. However, there is a decline in group
membership and participation in informal collective action
activities. This may have been because households were
time-constrained, so that in order to participate in project
activities, they needed to temporarily reduce their
participation in informal activities. An alternative
explanation is that the project improved the efficiency of
formal forms of social capital and thus households needed to
rely less on informal forms. Finally, the results indicate
that, in the short run, the project might have reduced the
number of other investments.
Citation
“Labonne, Julien; Chase, Robert S.. 2008. Do Community-Driven Development Projects Enhance Social Capital? Evidence from the Philippines. Policy Research Working Paper; No. 4678. © World Bank, Washington, DC. http://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/a3fc1318-b48a-54f3-ad94-da050c943f3f License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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