Here is a recording of our latest webinar for the PECS webinar series.
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Title:
Collective Decision Making & Local Public Goods – Experimental Evidence from Kenyas
Abstract:
One of Elinor Ostrom’s design principles for effective commons governance emphasizes the role of direct participation in decision making. Inclusion in collective decisions has been linked experimentally to greater self-stated willingness to invest in local public goods, increased public good contributions, and greater feelings of ownership over development projects, as compared with exclusion from or delegation of decisions. Yet there are a wide variety of methods that can be used to engage individuals directly in group decision making, and there is limited guidance on the design of collective choice institutions for achieving more socially optimal long-run outcomes. In this presentation, I will discuss evidence from two closely related experiments, one in the lab and one in the field (with co-author Michael Touchton), in which we randomly vary different participatory decision processes, ranging from purely aggregative to more deliberative approaches to group decision making. Both take place in the context of local public good provision in Kenya, where the constitution requires some form of citizen participation in government spending decisions and where the creation of local public goods is still quite salient due to a lack of basic infrastructure such as potable water systems. I will present data on the achievement of more socially optimal outcomes from the laboratory setting and on behavioral measures of long-run collective action from the field setting. We find that more deliberative procedures may lead to better decisions, but that these benefits do not necessarily translate into higher satisfaction among participants nor into greater long-run collective action. Our findings highlight tradeoffs in institutional design and suggest that practitioners and policy-makers should employ more demanding procedures only when they stand to be particularly impactful.
Bio:
Tara Grillos is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Purdue University and co-director of the JMK Experimental Social Science Research Lab. She received her PhD in Public Policy from Harvard University and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado’s Institute of Behavioral Science. Grillos teaches courses on environmental policy, causal inference, and experimental methods. Her research focuses on the human dimensions of sustainable development policy. She is interested in questions of participation, deliberation, collective action, and public goods provision, particularly with respect to natural resource dilemmas in developing countries.
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This is the latest in a series of webinars. Past recordings can be found here.
michaelschoon 