Community-driven development and social capital: Evidence from Morocco

Community-driven development (CDD) programs rest on the principle of development aid through active community participation. Their demand-driven and bottom-up nature of decision making is expected to promote pro-social behaviors by strengthening people’s interactions and civic responsibility. This paper studies the impact of one such program in rural Morocco on social capital. We used behavioral experiments in the field to measure social capital among households living in communes with and without the policy intervention. In particular, we played the dictator game to capture altruism, the public goods game to measure the willingness to contribute to the community, and the investment game to gain insights into levels of trust. Using a regression discontinuity framework, we find that CDD had a positive impact on public goods contribution, but from an already high sense of community responsibility. This sense of collective action increased with treatment intensity as proxied by the amount of total project spending. This is in contrast with the small and negative impact on trust that indirectly lowered trustworthiness, but trust was low in rural Morocco to begin with, particularly when money is involved. The program had no effect on altruism, perhaps because this is a more inherent value that does not change in the short run. In light of the Arab Spring, our results signal that the CDD approach may help enhance collective action as it shifts from a centralized to a more localized decision-making process. In the long term, this strengthened public participation could serve as an important building block for community development when people begin to have a higher sense of ownership and responsibility toward the welfare of their community, hence advancing the sustainability of the program and the community's economic progress.