Participatory Development Bangladesh

By Serena Cocciolo, Selene Ghisolfi

Summary and Key Findings

We analyse the impact of a Community Driven Development program on attitudes toward inequality and inequity and preferences for participatory decision-making. We exploit the implementation of a randomized control trial offering to rural Bangladeshi communities the construction of a public source of safe water, which requires the community to take collective decisions over key features of the project within a public consultation process. To elicit preferences toward redistribution and participation, we designed an innovative lab-in-the-field experiment. Randomly selected community members will play bargaining games where they decide how to allocate a common endowment among themselves, with and without the requirement of contributing to its creation. In a subsequent phase, we will measure individual willingness to pay for participatory decision-making versus delegation. Our findings will bring novel evidence on how the growing practice of participatory development affects social norms and preferences.