Introducing Uncertainty: Community Driven Development and Local Collective Action Capacity

Abstract

In areas with entrenched poverty and weak state presence, community driven development (CDD) initia-tives aim to secure the provision of services such as water, waste water and electricity, while engaging the community as stakeholders in a way that ensures sustainability. CDD is today a widely used approach in both government and donor funded development efforts. Communities prioritize local needs and contrib-ute resources and labor; external actors provide support, sometimes contingent, consisting of supplementary funding and sometimes capacity building. Given limited resources for development, not all community projects can be supported by external funds and considerable variation exists with respect to how commu-nity projects are selected. In many CDD programs, the selection process induces competition between local communities over external funds, even if this is not the intention. In those cases, communities mobilize and coordinate efforts under conditions of significant uncertainty regarding whether the external funds will be provided, and thus if the public good will materialize. This paper spotlights this aspect of CDD program design and sounds a call for more systematic assessment of how CDD design affects local collective action capacity. We illustrate the arguments with data from 87 interviews on rural development efforts in Tanzania, comparing two cases from the same local context but differing in terms of CDD design.