Webinar #24: Experimental Assessment of the Collective Action Impacts of Participatory Rangeland Management in Kenya and Tanzania

Community-level interventions are common in international development practice. Some of these community interventions combine investments in capacity building, leadership and collective action with direct investments in an attempt to improve individual and household outcomes in the community. Ultimately, the success of such interventions hinges on their ability to change local institutions in ways that bring efficiency or equity gains and improve incentives for better long-run resource management and productivity. The question on whether such interventions impact community norms with sufficient persistence as to provide lasting effects on these outcomes remains largely unanswered. This policy-relevant question has significant practical importance since the long-term impact of interventions depend on the formation of norms that would benefit communities, households and individuals. 

At this webinar, Muthoni Ng’ang’a and Irene Nganga present a project that aims to evaluate whether institutional interventions solve a common problem in pastoralist communities and affect the collective action norms of individuals in the community. The project is also designed to assess whether heterogeneity in the willingness to contribute to public goods can be linked to innate or baseline collective action norms of individuals.