World Development Vol. 40, No. 4, pp. 758770, 2012 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2011.09.016

Pitfalls of Externally Initiated Collective Action: A Case Study from South Africa
BJORN VOLLAN * Leibniz Center for Marine Tropical Ecology (ZMT), Bremen, Germany
Summary. Namaqualand government ocials face a strong obligation to empower formerly disadvantaged communities by delegating tasks or devolving power. Theoretically, the external agents capitalize on existing network structures, norms, and trust relations within a village in order to stimulate collective action. In practice, single purpose committees are often set up in communities with high unemployment and where people have no resources for successful collective action. This study aggregates household level data and combines it with a community level survey to provide evidence that a high number of externally initiated committees have a negative eect on aggregated trust and reciprocity within a community. This is caused by a stronger lack of downward accountability and transparency as well as coordination problems leading to unclear leadership. Further, a comparison between the old and new commons shows that because communities have dierent histories and thus dierent social cohesion and fundraising willingness, their relative advantages in the devolution process dier. 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Key words South Africa, Namaqualand, public service delivery, community participation, single purpose committee, building social capital

1. INTRODUCTION In many communities all over the world people work together to provide goods and services that are not provided by their government. They build and maintain roads, religious buildings and community halls, operate nursery schools, re control groups and neighborhood patrols, and establish rules for maintaining and managing public goods and collectively owned natural resources. Since the 1980s many transitional and developing countries around the world have started to decentralize and devolve power to elected councils, allowing to share responsibility for maintaining public services such as schools and health clinics with their local or central government. 1 An often mentioned benet is to decrease corruption and increase management eciency as central government does not possess the relevant local knowledge (Bardhan & Mookherjee, 2005). On top of this a second wave of decentralization starting in the mid-1990s has taken place resulting in a large number of single-purpose committees responsible for maintenance and management (womens self-help groups, water user committees, development committees, parent-teacher committees, health committees, forest management committees, and many more) in Asia, Africa, and Latin America as has been described by Manor (2004). Recent evidence from randomized eld experiments questions the eciency of community based management. Kremer, Leino, Miguel, and Zwane (2008) found that contracting private maintenance service for spring protection may be the better alternative than similar funded committee-based management schemes. It has frequently been argued that a communitys social capital is crucial to its success in providing and maintaining public goods and services (Alesina & La Ferrara, 2000; Bowles & Gintis, 2002). This article analyzes a broader perspective of single purpose user committees. There is a belief widely held by development practitioners and some theorists that grass-root participation and interaction between people increases the stock of social capital in a community and thereby boosts economic development and empowerment (Evans, 1996; Warner, 2001). In principle, single purpose committees are a platform
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for communication and repeated interaction where parties have to follow their commitments and thus, it is likely that committees can indeed increase trust or social capital. If carried out correctly, establishing committees might also force external government bodies to engage in more genuine dialog and participatory approaches within health, school, infrastructural services, and management of natural resources. Researchers have thus emphasized that villagers should have multiple channels to outside organizations that enable them to engage in dialog with governments or NGOs (Upho, 1993, p. 619), probably because multiple channels increase interaction and thus stimulate social capital. The view of building social capital is also reected in South Africas White Paper on Local Government (Republic of South Africa, 1998), which claims that developmental local government is characterized by [. . .] building social capital through providing community leadership and vision, and seeking to empower marginalized and excluded groups within the community. This emphasis has been even more pronounced since the implementation of the Batho Pele (people rst) initiative for public service delivery. Only very recent evidence convincingly shows how social capital can be built through external structures. Feigenberg, Field, and Pande (2010) provide experimental evidence that mandatory meetings between micronance clients generated persistent changes in clients social ties, improved informal risk-sharing, and
* I greatly appreciate the nancial support (Commission No. 01 LC 0024A) by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the support of the BIOTA Southern Africa Project (Biodiversity Monitoring Transect Analysis). I received valuable comments from three anonymous referees, Nicky Allsopp, Rick Rohde, Timm Homan, Michael Kirk, Evelyn Korn, Bernd Hayo, Sebastian Prediger participants of the Buchenbach Workshop on Evolutionary Economics 2005, participants of the IASCP Conference 2006, and participants at the PLAAS seminar June, 2006. I thank Millie Saul for research assistance in the eld, Lizande Kellerman for translation, and Di Kilpert for editing the manuscript. All remaining errors are of course mine. Final revision accepted: August 12, 2011.

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reduced default. Attanasio, Pellerano, and Reyes (2009) show that social capital was possibly built through a two-year conditional cash transfer program Familias en Accion which involves social activities such as attending meetings and courses or simply visiting a health center. Besides Petro (2001) focusing on the role of local elites in Russia, scant attention has been paid to the necessary circumstances for building social capital. This case study aims at opening up this black box. What happens where initial human and social capital is very low, as in formerly disadvantaged communities or where local authorities delegate from obligation rather than from conviction? Does regular social contact between community members through an increase in the delegation of tasks or the devolution of power to communities necessarily lead to an increase in social capital? Where social capital is created from the outside, by decentralization or by obliging people to participate, conict can arise. As highlighted in Ostrom (2000) social capital is hard to construct through external interventions. When national and regional governments take over full responsibilities for large realms of human activities, they limit other eorts to enter these elds. Ostrom (2000) advocates external empowerment but clearly sees the constraints. Public bureaucracies often follow their own agendas (maximizing inuence, expanding budgets, and increasing number of subordinates) which may not generate the intended results unless ocials are strongly motivated to facilitate the growth and empowerment of others. Only a few authors have argued that delegation may have negative eects. Manor (2004) refers to a damaging second wave of decentralization with destructive conicts over nancial resources that lead to fragmented village participation and committees becoming parallel structures to elected local government that undermine eciency and accountability of the rst wave of the decentralization process. Latif (2002) characterizes single purpose committees as less accountable to the population than to the outside organization, thus more instrumental and more prone to elite capture. The paper presents a case study from Namaqualand (Northern Cape Province, South Africa) where villages with only 300 households reported having on average nine committees. The aim of this article is at least twofold. On the one hand I analyze the policy relevant issue of devolution and oer an alternative view on local institutions and especially committees that contradict assumptions of many practitioners. The South African government uses a blueprint for creating new local, single purpose, sector specic institutions and committees besides the existing local governance structure (ward committee). I analyze the eect these external interventions have on cooperative behavior since it is known that external interventions that change underlying incentive structures to cooperate might crowd out intrinsic motivation to cooperate (Bowles, 2008). 2 The paper further outlines the way past cooperation in grazing management inuences what elements are most needed in the devolution process from outside organizations (building social capital vs. nancial help). On the other hand I draw from (and contribute to) three distinct lines of literature that are much related with each other. The purpose of this work is not to develop a new theoretical framework incorporating all distinct strains of literature but rather to apply an existing framework mainly used for analyzing sustainable management of jointly used natural resources (Poteete, Janssen, & Ostrom, 2010; Vollan & Ostrom, 2010) to decentralization policies in South Africa. Following this approach broader contextual variables such as decentralization policies and historical dependence might impact the levels of trust that other participants

are reciprocators, levels of cooperation and hence net benets for the community. This relation is analyzed using standard questions from the social capital literature. 2. BACKGROUND (a) Study site The largest ethnic group in the study site is the coloreds. The term colored refers to an ethnic group of mixed race people who often possess some sub-Saharan African ancestry but not enough to be considered Black under the law of South Africa. The Kamiesberg and Nama Khoi Municipalities in Namaqualand contain the three former colored reserves of Leliefontein, Steinkopf, and Komaggas (see Figure 1). At 0.9 people per square kilometer, the population density of Kamiesberg is extremely low for South Africa (3 for Nama Khoi Municipality). Of the 10,759 people in the Kamiesberg Municipality, approximately half live in Leliefontein communal areahereafter referred to as the old commons (new commons being land given to a community after apartheid as described below). The Leliefontein communal area comprises 10 villages with 5,223 inhabitants, or approximately 1,500 households. Kharkams, the biggest settlement with 1,291 inhabitants, is situated on the main road from Cape Town to Springbok (Statistics South Africa, 2001). The other villages have on average 450 inhabitants. Only 13.2% of the people in the Leliefontein communal areas are employed and 50% of the employed colored population in the Namakwa district has a monthly income below 800 South African rand (see Table 3 in Appendix). 3 The high rate of unemployment means that many people rely on state pensions, welfare grants, remittances from relatives working in nearby towns or coastal diamond mines, or occasional salaries coming from infrastructure construction work. According to Anseeuw (2000), 87% of the 108 households of Leliefontein covered in his survey, receive social transfers (for 37% of the families, these transfers are the main source of income). Villagers furthermore rely heavily on natural resources for fuel wood and grazing for their livestock in common property regimes. In some areas dry land crop farming is practiced. The Kamiesberg Municipality is a local municipality (Category B) consisting of four wards and governed by a council based in the district capital Garies. The council approves policies and by-laws, has to pass a budget for the municipality each year, charge service fees, and must also decide on development plans and service delivery for their municipal area. Each of the four wards directly elects a councilor. The other four members are elected through a proportional representation ballot, where voters vote for a party. The direct elected councilor of each ward is also the chairperson of the village ward committee. Other ward committee members (up to 10) are elected by the residents of the respective ward and their job is to represent the various interests in the community. The ward committees main tasks are to communicate and consult with the community in respect of development and service plans and to play a role in developing local projects. The ward committee has, however, no formal power to force the municipal council to do anything. The externally initiated user groups and single purpose committees do not relate to the elected local government (council and ward committee) nor to existing customary organizations like clans or tribal groups (these do not exist in Namaqualand). When it came to self-organization and service delivery, the commons in the Namaqualand reserves were confronted with

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Figure 1. Namaqualand and colored reserves (gray shaded). The focus of the study is the area around Leliefontein. Map taken with permission of authors from Wisborg and Rohde (2005).

severe challenges in the past. Starting with colonial oppression and the allocation of unproductive land to the colored community, the situation worsened with the 1913 Land Act, which made it illegal for Africans to own or lease land outside the reserves. The reserves became mainly a pool of migrant workers for the coastal diamond mines. According to the Bantu Education Act of 1953, Africans were only to be educated to a degree which would give them the skills to serve their own people and perform laboring work for the whites and to prevent urbanization by keeping the coloreds in the reserves. During that time the maintenance of the infrastructure on the commons was under the authority of the Department of Colored Rural Areas, which could overrule any decision of the local people and was mainly there to ensure that the economic development of these areas was in line with the interests of white farmers (Rohde, Homan, & Cousins, 1999, p. 5). In 1995, shortly after the abolition of apartheid, the newly elected South African government initiated municipal elections for the Transitional Local Councils (TLCs) and created municipalities in all rural areas. Since 1998, under the new Constitution, the municipalities have played a key role in the provision of basic services, in particular water, sanitation, refuse removal, electricity, roads, public transport, town planning, and decisions around land use. However, the municipality together with the responsible ministry often prefers to work with a new established user committee (instead the elected ward committee) where they can inuence and control the composition and decisions more easily. The sectoral approach taken by most governments in southern Africa when establishing committees means that a number of community workers represent various departments and agencies in one area (Swanepoel, 1992, p. 112). User committees play a key role in the aims of public service delivery. Most villages have permanent committees for common pasture, tourism, schools, welfare, and health as well as committees for projects such as gardening, policing, or funerals. The authority of the committee extends as far as choosing the subcontractor for specic tasks, allocating local labor, and monitoring performance. Depending on their state of development, villages may have further committees to organize basic infrastructure needs such as housing, electricity, water, roads, fences, and sport facilities.

Since 1994, Namaqualand has been part of a broader process of land redistribution in South Africa, in which the government bought land from commercial farmers and transferred it to rural communities. More than 275,000 ha of private farmland have been bought by government and added as new commons, increasing the total communal area by about 20% (Wisborg & Rohde, 2005). The new commons are fenced-in farms with relatively good infrastructure, unlike the old commons, which lack fences and have poor infrastructure. (b) Framework used in the analysis Committees are means to solve collective action problems in communities. Collective action problems occur in situations in which the uncoordinated action of individuals is less benecial than coordinated action. Olson (1965) argues that incentives in collective action lead individuals to act in a self-interested way that interferes with the collective aim. Collective action problems often arise in relation to public goods, which attract free riders who do not contribute to production or conservation of the goods (i.e., do not cooperate). It would be best if everybody would contribute to collective action (i.e., cooperate), but each individual is usually better o to try to free-ride and let others provide the good. However, if all or most people free-ride, the good is not provided. According to Ostrom (1998) trust, reciprocity, and the expectation that others will also cooperate are three crucial components for explaining cooperation and successful collective action. Renements of the relationships described in Ostrom (1998) resulted in the theoretical framework proposed by Poteete et al. (2010). 4 The framework departs with learning and norm-adopting (in contrast to selsh rational) individuals who trust others who have a reputation for being trustworthy (see Figure 2). The decisions made by individuals are aected by micro-situational variables and broader contextual variables. Examples of micro-situational variables include group size, communication, heterogeneity among participants, reputation, and time horizons. Examples of broader context that might matter in this study are policies at higher levels of organization (decentralization policy, empowerment, and former apartheid).

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Figure 2. Framework with the core relationship of co-operation based on Poteete et al. (2010). The main inuences analyzed in this paper are how broader contextual variables inuence trust and reciprocity.

An increase in user committees tends to increase communication and there is strong evidence that the possibility of communication increases the potential for successful collective action (Sally, 1995). However, policies at the broader context level might sometimes create situations that do interfere with the positive eect of communication. In Section 4.3 I analyze, aggregated for several villages, the levels of trust that others are reciprocators which is the crucial concept to explain successful collective action. I hypothesize that the levels of trust that others are reciprocators is inuenced by the public infrastructure providers need to interact with communities and the establishment of committees to solve (potential) collective action problems. The resulting question is whether the benevolent third parties (the government and NGOs) help people to build trust, or whether they (unintentionally) destroy trust in their aim to solve the collective action problem inherent in the maintenance and management of public goods. Because of dierences in broader contextual variables, case studies and eld experiments are needed to test whether people in dierent contexts dier in the decisions they make. For example we do not know whether and how, more than 10 years after the end of apartheid, the dependency of the apartheid system aects learning and norm-adopting individuals. Shackleton, von Maltitz, and Evans (1998, p. 21) characterize South African communities as not having had a long tradition of cooperation. The importance of past cooperation for learning and norm-adopting individuals in social dilemmas is widely documented (Agrawal, 2003; Baland & Platteau, 1996; Ostrom, 1990). Trust generates social obligations and thus induces others to trust as well. Cooperation increases and potentially generates net benets for the community. The increase in trust leads to an increase in the reputation for being trustworthy, such that successful interactions in turn reinforce trust (Ostrom, 1998, p. 12). In Figure 2 the achievement of net benets from cooperation feed backs on the norm adopting individual. Besides the dependency that is a hangover from apartheid, past cooperation in the villages might also play a major role for successful decentralization, devolution, and delegation today as discussed in Sections 4.4 and 4.5. Applying a behavioral approach in the local context of the Namaqualand implies the measurement of trust, reciprocity, and the expectation that others are trustworthy. While recent studies increasingly make use of eld lab experiments to measure these latent variables (Vollan & Ostrom, 2010) earlier work uses survey questions. In this paper I use standard survey questions from social capital literature (Narayan & Cassidy, 2001) and refer to Norman Uphos useful categorization of social capital into two types: structural and cognitive (Upho, 1993). According to Upho and Wijayaratna (2000), structural social capital facilitates mutually benecial collective action

and consists of groups, organizations, and networks that can be created from outside, whereas cognitive social capital predisposes people toward mutually benecial collective action and is comprised of social norms and values that aect the eciency of structural social capital. The mechanism through which the cognitive elements of social capital reinforce each other and predispose people to cooperate is precisely described in Ostroms behavioral approach to the rational choice theory of collective action (1998). If people trust each other and expect others to cooperate, they are more likely to contribute to collective action, form groups, and participate in meetings, and this makes it easier to delegate tasks or devolve power to the local level. Instead of using the umbrella term social capital or referring to a specic denition of social capital, I mostly refer directly to trust, reciprocity, networks, and membership in an organization, where applicable. 3. METHODS To assess household level social capital, participation in collective action and participation in village meetings, 151 structured interviews were conducted in the Namaqualand area of South Africa from August to November 2004. The household survey was carried out in 10 villages in two Municipalities (seven villages in Kamiesberg and three in Nama Khoi). The study encompasses three former colored reserves: Leliefontein area in the Kamiesberg Municipality and Kommaggas and Steinkopf in the Nama Khoi Municipality. Since we did not have a list of all the households in a village it was not possible to draw a representative random sample. Within the villages the enumerator(s) started at two dierent locations in the villages and approached every 10th house on the right hand side of a street (to prevent peer- or neighborhood eects). Respondents were the head of the household or their spouse (dependent on the availability of the person). The enumerators in the villages were trained and selected following recommendations from local organizations. The aim was to complete 20 surveys within each village. 5 However, in three villages (Kheis, Klipfontein, and Bulletrap) the response rate was lower than expected or data were missing from the questionnaires, so the questionnaires from these villages were used only for household level analysis (Section 4.4) but not in the analysis based on aggregation at village level (Section 4.3). To make the case study context as homogeneous as possible in Section 4.3 the focus is only on the villages in the Kamiesberg Municipality (n = 79). The logit regression in 4.3 and 4.4 makes use of a testing-down procedure at 10% nominal signicance level (see Hendry, 1993) to increase estimation eciency by reducing the number of variables in the model.

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In addition to the household survey, a standardized semistructured community level survey was used to assess the number of projects, associations, and committees through focus group discussion with village leaders and committee members. The focus group interviews were conducted in 20 villages of the Kamiesberg and Nama Khoi Municipality (all villages with majority colored population). Table 3 in Appendix shows socio-demographic information from the household survey aggregated by village (upper panel) and basic information from the community questionnaire (lower panel) on the number of active committees and meetings with municipalities and other organizations for the same villages. Each section of the results draws on slightly dierent samples or combination of data sources and will be re-introduced in the beginning of each result section. The analysis presented here is based on correlations from a cross-sectional household and community survey which cannot provide robust causal interpretations (see Durlauf, 2002). I control for most obvious omitted variables, but I do not claim to make robust causal inference, and argue for the plausibility of certain causal interpretations. 4. RESULTS AND ANALYSIS (a) A rationale for establishing single purpose committees Participation in committees is voluntary and often unpaid but participation increases if signicant individual benets can be expected. On the date of the interviews, villagers of Tweerivier (with approximately 300 inhabitants) named up to 13 committees that they thought existed in their village. In answer to the question How do you solve a problem in the community? 33% of the villagers in Tweerivier and Spoegrivier said they contacted an outside organization. Figure 3 gives an idea of the relation between the unemployment rate and the number of committees per 100 persons. The indicated relation suggests that the establishment of external committees may be motivated by peoples need and their unemployment or simply because more people have time to serve the committees when unemployment is high. The correlation coecient
90
Unemployment

between the number of committees per 100 inhabitants and the unemployment rate is 0.72. Regression results between the number of committees per 100 inhabitants and the unemployment rate have an adjusted R2 of 52%, with the unemployment rate being signicant at the 1% level. It seems plausible that high unemployment precedes and causes the high number of committees since the unemployment level has not changed dramatically in Namaqualand in the past 1520 years and most committees were established in the last 510 years. So, why might unemployment cause establishment of committees? The high unemployment and the end of apartheid also changed many peoples attitudes, making them expect compensation from government (i.e., some kind of monetary benet from projects or short-term employment possibilities), and this in turn obliged the external establishers of a project to provide some kind of revenue to the community if possible. Not surprisingly, Anseeuw (2000, p. 48) found that 39.5% of the interviewed households earned their income from occasional wages, compared to only 28.7% from regular salaries. Given that both unpaid and paid occasional work is distributed via committees, for many people committees are income opportunities. The expected monetary revenue from occasional jobs is higher when the committee is meant to provide or maintain a public infrastructure (housing and other infrastructure projects) as compared with committees that are meant to manage a common-pool resource or provide a social service (education, health, welfare, security, funeral, or community garden). But also the latter might oer direct or indirect benets for the committee members (e.g., status, inuence in decision-making, short-term employment contracts). While communities mostly need employment, donors often require bottom-up processes (this increases legitimacy and popularity of the donor) without considering the usefulness of the committee for the implementation process. Unfortunately, government employees often have no experience and see no benet in bottom-up process (which might be correct for some projects). Often it might be more ecient to deliver services without establishing a user committee. On the other extreme, there are even situations showing that decentralization dictated top-down may be misused by the state to get
7

Committees per 100 inhabitants

70 5 60 50 40 30 2 20 10 0
be H on rg de kl ip Ba y Ka rk am s Bu lle tra p Le lie fo nt So ei n eb at sf R on oo te ifo in nt ei nN or ap Pa ul sh oe k Kl ip fo nt ei n N ou riv ie r Sp oe gr iv ie r Tw ee ri v ie r rg si sk ro on g Be us

4 3

1 0

ie

Ka

ar

ol

Villages
Figure 3. Unemployment and the creation of committees. Notes: (a) unemployment and population data from ocial data (Statistics South Africa). (b) Number of external committees assessed with community level questionnaire. (c) The gure contains all villages from Kamiesberg Municipality (additionally Bulletrap, Carolusberg, Bergsig from Nama Khoi Municipality).

committees per 100 inhabitants

80

unemployment rate (%)

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rid of obligations in times of tight budgets (Ngaido & Kirk, 2000). Communities with higher unemployment and greater need might be less demanding in the negotiation process of establishing committees (asking less power to enforce and monitor the provider and agree to a pseudo democratic selection of leaders). Communities with higher unemployment might also more likely establish committees in the hope that sooner or later they will generate some benets to the members. Thus, from this perspective it might be easier for external agents to work with communities with higher unemployment. It might also be that donors feel a greater need and thus tend to set-up their project in areas of high unemployment. As a result, the high expectations of the local population, is confronted with single purpose committees that are often implemented without oering occasional jobs, without devolving adequate resources and power and with a pseudo democratic selection of leaders. (b) Principal component analysis Factor analysis is a multivariate statistical technique for isolating common factors in order to get a small set of uncorrelated variables from a large set of variables (most of which are correlated to each other). Here, the aim was to combine variables, with an objective basis for selecting items, which describe a certain dimensions of social capital. Since the data comes from standard questionnaire items and there exists a wide range of theory on social capital and its dimensions the factor analysis uses already existing factor labeling where possible. Specically, the procedure was based on Narayan and Cassidy (2001) who validated their items for a heterogeneous sample in Ghana and Uganda. I also use the complete household survey (n = 215) including the observations from southern Namibia (n = 64) to build the factors. All scales in the survey were examined and recoded where necessary to achieve consistency in direction: that is, the higher the value for any given question the greater is social capital. The reduction into factors was done using Categorical Principal Components Analysis. First, a group of variables was chosen that has been proposed by Narayan and Cassidy (2001) to belong to two different factors. The conrmations of the factors lead to the omission of certain variables or the creation of additional factors. As a rough rule of thumb, variables that had loadings below 0.5 on one of the factors were omitted. The variables comprised to one factor are quite highly correlated with one another, with all correlation coecients signicant at a 0.05 level or better. Thus, the factors have a high Cronbach a indicating a high reliability. Additionally the content of the factors are comprised with a set of meaningful variables allowing a naming of the factors in the way proposed by Narayan and Cassidy (2001) or others (see Table 1). The table contains the rotated factor loadings, which are the correlations between the variable and the factor. High loadings on a common factor indicate reliability and that the items measure a common conceptual property. The factors were transformed into an index for dierent quartiles or quintiles to ease interpretation. Altogether seven factors were derived. The rst two factors, civic engagement and satised with rules, are directly inuenced by the delegation or devolution process. Network resources and social cohesion, are related to Lins (2001) concept of social capital that emphasizes the resources one can get from ones network. Fundraising willingness captures peoples willingness to provide public goods in the community. Trust in local institutions and Trust in new institutions are measures for stability, legitimacy, and participation in certain organizations, and fundraising willingness

captures peoples likelihood to contribute nancially to a public good. (c) Do single purpose committees build social capital in the Namaqualand? In this section I examine the preconditions for collective actiontrust in community members and reciprocityand look at how their presence or absence is inuenced by the extent to which outside structure has been implemented. If we accept that social capital can be built from the outside, we should then observe that villages with a large number of structural components (i.e., committees) should possess or have built up a higher stock of trust and reciprocity. Using the sample for the four villages of comparable size in the Kamiesberg Municipality (n = 79) 6 and a logit model to test the eect of many committees (more than 10) and eliminating the jointly nonsignicant variables (Hendry, 1993), we obtain the marginal eects (dy/dx) in (Eqn. (1)). All seven factors derived in Section 4.2 as well as the theoretical important variables reciprocity, trust, voluntary, and paid collective action are included in the testing-down process. Since there is a negative and signicant correlation between trust in community members and committee membership (0.14; p < 0.1) and a possible relation between unemployment and committee membership (see Section 4.1), I control for being a member of a committee and being unemployed even though the coecients are insignicant in the multivariate setting 7: P Many Village Committees 1 0:12 Committee member 0:20 Unemployed 0:10 Unpaid Collective work 0:10 Community Trust 0:15 Reciprocity 0:14 Satisfied with rules
2

No of obs.: 79; Pseudo R = 0.29. Note: (a) The symbols ***, **, and * indicate signicance at the 1%, 5%, and 10% level, respectively. (b) The displayed gures are the marginal eects calculated at the mean (not the coecients). The regression control approach shows that lack of aggregated trust and reciprocity goes together with a high number of committees. While trust is measured on a scale from 1 to 4, reciprocity is an additive index constructed from giving and returning favors to neighbors and borrowing and lending money to friends. In case a person both gives and receives favors from her neighbors she obtains the maximum score of 2, if she neither gives nor receives favors her score is 1, and if she either gives or receives a favor her score is 0. The same logic is applied to borrowing and lending money such that the index varies between 0 and 4. Furthermore, Eqn. (1) shows the lower satisfaction with local rules and procedures and a higher degree of voluntary collective action, measured by days of unpaid collective action in villages with many externally created committees. These ndings make sense when further observations are taken into account. Firstly, since Ostroms behavioral approach has high internal validity, spurious correlation is unlikely. The variables trust and belief that others are trustworthy are highly correlated at the individual level (0.36; n = 151; p < .01) and reciprocity captures an additional eect that people are conditionally cooperative (i.e., only cooperate when others do so). Secondly, the nding that where there are more committees there is more voluntary collective action is expected. Surprisingly, although not signicant in the

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WORLD DEVELOPMENT Table 1. Factors loadings derived from the household survey on social capital (n = 215)

Factor (Cronbach a) Civic engagement (a = .81)

Variables included Participation in local meetings Involved in decision-making Informed about local things Participation in municipal meetings Rules exible to peoples needs Happy with decisions in meetings Rules exible to natures needs Borrow money from somebody Lend somebody money Somebody to ask for money Somebody to watch for the children Did favor to neighbor Received a favor from neighbor Number of friends Attend community ceremonies Participate without beneting Fee for collective maintenance Belief that others contribute money Trust in political parties Trust in municipal ocials Trust in committees Trust in researcher Trust in NGOs Trust in landbank

Factor loading .913 .875 .851 .653 .815 .744 .590 .931 .925 .520 .483 .871 .784 .611 .524 .792 .731 .633 .996 .946 .869 .831 .709 .683

Satised with rules (a = .53)

Network resources (a = .70)

Social cohesion (a = .61)

Fundraising willingness (a = .44)

Trust in local institutions (a = .75)

Trust in new institutions (a = .67)

multivariate setting, there are more people employed in occasional work in the village with fewer committees (v2 = 4.3; n = 79; p < .05). This means that villages with more committees generate less direct benets but more voluntary work and that monetary benet from participation is not harmful to social capital and might even increase or build social capital while voluntary work does not lead to higher social capital. The above results suggest that there could be more social service committees (higher likelihood of voluntary work) and less public infrastructure committees (higher likelihood of occasional work) in the villages with many committees and thus that the purpose of the committee and not the number of committees drives the result. The four villages do not dier much in terms of infrastructure projects. 8 The village Tweerivier is closest to the main road and some houses already had electricity (20%). There was also an on-going sanitation and housing project at the time of the survey in Tweerivier. Spoegrivier and Paulshoek also had a housing, sanitation, and electrication project while Soebatsfontein only had a housing project. The main dierence between the villages is that Spoegrivier and Tweerivier developed single purpose committees for sanitation and electricity while these tasks are integrated in the ward committee in Paulshoek (or do not exist as in Soebatsfontein). However, there are also more social service committees in Spoegrivier and Tweerivier which makes it impossible to disentangle the importance of the purpose of the committee for the inuence on trust and reciprocity. The lower level of trust and reciprocity in villages with many committees is likely driven by a mix of unfullled expectations, stronger lacking of downward accountability and transparency, and a poor coordination between the village organizations. For example in villages with many committees people do go less often to meetings (v2 = 3.6; n = 79; p < 0.1) although there are more meetings scheduled. 9 In Tweerivier (a village with 13 committees) most respondents said there is too little communication during meetings as well as too little communication by the committees to the village about the content of the meetings. This interferes with the good practices for monitoring, reporting, ownership, and accountability that

are essential for functioning committee work. Committee meetings are held in isolation and the rest of the village is unaware of what goes on in the meetings and thus is skeptical about the committees. It could also be possible that the eect of lower trust and reciprocity in villages with many committees is driven by one or two committees that were established without the necessary dialog and training in the villages with many committees. However, if this were the case one would not expect to see overall trust and reciprocity within the village to decrease but rather a decline of trust toward specic committees. Both factors trust in new institutions and trust in local institutions are not aected. Furthermore, governments use blueprints for establishing committees in the Namaqualand such that it is unlikely to assume that the establishment of committees diered across villages. Thus, it seems plausible to assume that it is the number of committees and not the approach of establishing them that leads to lower trust and reciprocity in this case study. The lacking accountability, transparency, and coordination might also lead to unclear leadership and rumors that the leaders are dishonest. For example people in Spoegrivier (a village with 14 committees) responded to the open-ended question What are the problems in the village? that they are given no information about meetings, and that there are political dierences and unclear leadership. A consequence might be that groups will not solve their conicts but instead form new committees. 10 Whether elite capture is a problem in the Namaqualand and whether it is stronger in villages with many committees is unclear. Selection of leaders by donors and government organizations are never done by secret voting in the Namaqualand. A member of a committee which is granted money, particularly a chairperson, is in a strategic position where the temptation to be untrustworthy can be very strong. Often this is even the perceived right of leaders who devoted considerable energies to the setting-up of the local organization and interacting with the public infrastructure provider. But even trustworthy committee leaders can act in favor to certain people in their village by hiring them as workers or subcontractors for the relevant tasks. Often the selection of

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the committee is inuenced toward the more educated people since they make it easier to collaborate with. Taking the whole sample, there is indeed a signicantly higher level of education for committee members than noncommittee members (t = 2.34; n = 151; p = 0.02) and committee members are signicantly younger with 42 years compared to 47 years (t = 2.24; n = 151; p = 0.03), there are more people that gain their income from occasional work in committees (v2 = 3.84; n = 151; p = 0.05) and there is no dierence in gender or income. The more educated and younger people are often the local elites and we know that local elites are capable of turning the institutions and opportunities created through decentralization to their own advantage (Platteau & Gaspart, 2003; Ribot, Agrawal, & Larson, 2006). Another indication of elite capture might be a high number of functions for a few people. Thirty percentage of committee members are in more than one committee in the Namaqualand and the correlation between membership in committees and being member of farmer association, a co-operative union or a political party is very high (0.4; n = 151; p = 0.01). Moreover, committee members were also much more likely to have a responsibility such as fund raising, organizing events or doing administrative work in associations, unions and political parties (0.4; n = 151; p = 0.01). While one might expect that younger more educated people dominate the committees it remains unclear whether this indicates elite capture. There is no data on actual embezzling of funds. The composition of young and educated people could also indicate that local people take the committees serious and elect people that have the important bridging function of social capital or that there is a limited willingness of others to spend their time on a committee. (d) The need for a context-dependent devolution process in Namaqualand To analyze the eect of past cooperation for devolution, I compare Soebatsfontein, the one village in the Kamiesberg Municipality that had no village commons and thus less possibility for past cooperation until it received common land after apartheid (new commons), with the other villages from the former colored rural reserves in Leliefontein, Steinkopf and Komaggas that have owned land and cooperated with each other but were dependent on outside help for maintenance and management (old commons). 11 The dierences between the new commons and the old commons are presented in (Eqn. (2)). I apply a logit regression model (Eqn. (2)) including all villages (also from Nama Khoi Municipality and with a dummy variable that takes the value of 1 for the new commons as dependent variable. Only fundraising willingness and social cohesion remain in the model after eliminating the jointly nonsignicant variables (the initial model uses the same variables and factors as in Eqn. (1)). Gjertsen and Barrett (2004, p. 329) argue that fundraising willingness and community cohesion are important determinants for the optimal management strategy of natural resources (self-governance, co-management, state governed). Consequently, the old commons and the new commons each have dierent advantages which highlight the context dependence for devolution. The remainder of this section discusses the importance of these two factors in the Namaqualand. P New Commons 1 0:07 Fundraising willingness 0:10 Social cohesion No of obs.: 151; Pseudo R = 0.09.
2

Note: (a) The symbols ***, **, and * indicate signicance at the 1%, 5%, and 10% level, respectively. (b) The displayed gures are the marginal eects calculated at the mean (not the coecients). Social cohesiona factor comprised of the number of friends, the frequency of doing a favor for a neighbor and the frequency of attending community ceremoniesis signicantly higher in the old commons. Natural resource use in the old commons, such as collective herding strategies or the informal allocation of grazing land, has facilitated cooperative agreements between the villagers (Allsopp, Laurent, Debeaudoin, & Samuels, 2007). Gjertsen and Barrett (2004) claim that a low level of village cohesion is an identier for relative higher government eciency. Management, monitoring, and enforcement tasks cannot as easily be transferred if multiple interests exist in the community. A further indicator of the multiple interests is that according to the household survey Soebatsfontein has a much higher Gini coecient (0.61) than villages from the old commons: Paulhoek (0.49), Spoegrivier (0.48), or Tweerivier (0.43). In contrast to the old commons, in the new commons, where there were no past cooperative agreements about resource access to rely on, there was no pressure to learn collective behavior and to develop a common vision of their community. The lower village cohesion (and higher heterogeneity in the livelihood strategies) may be a factor that makes it dicult for Soebatsfontein to use and participate in the new village institutions eectively. Consequently, committee members report that they meet only irregularly (v2 = 6.5; p < .01). In the old commons an environment of togetherness was a vehicle for social learning. In particular the inherent conicts over resource use and thus the presence of mechanisms of punishment and reward seem to be crucial in a context of social learning (Van den Bergh & Stagl, 2003, p. 296). Eqn. (2) further shows that past dependency still restricts the willingness to contribute money to the community (fundraising willingness) in the old commons. This result is independent from income since in the old commons of Leliefontein (avg. 1373 ZAR; std. dev. 1072) and in the new commons (avg. 1268 ZAR; std. dev. 1150) average income in the sample is not statistically dierent (t = 0.50; n = 151; p = 0.61). A lower willingness to contribute money to the community without getting ones own direct rewards diminishes the communitys ability to repair minor damage by themselves and increases their reliance on outside entities. Many people are also not paying for municipal service deliveries, because they think services should be delivered for free as was done in the past. A good example is that most people in the old commons refuse to pay grazing fees that would be used by the land use committee to maintain infrastructure such as wind pumps. Since the communities are unable to raise enough cash, the overburdened municipality remains responsible for the repairs, although it tries to delegate the responsibility back to the communities. During apartheid the communities were not allowed to repair infrastructure on their own but had to report damages to the council, who would then eventually send somebody to do the repair. Thus the communities in the old commons were never asked to recover the costs but always had to rely on external agency for help. On the new commons in Soebatsfontein, on the other hand, farmers were employed by commercial farmers and trained to repair infrastructure. Today these semi-commercial farmers see it as part of their job to repair damage on their own and do not as often report it to the municipality.

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WORLD DEVELOPMENT Table 2. Summary statistics of participants in the common-pool resource experiment and voting result

Region Old commons Leliefontein New acquired commons

n 115 45

Mean age 39 36

Mean years of formal education 9,0 8,0

% Male 48 44

% at Work 51 51

Mean monthly income 884,72 953,20

% Vote communication 50 31

% Vote penalty 11 33

(e) Context-dependent preferences and institutional choice This section analyzes peoples institutional choices in the old and the new commons. I draw on the voting results from common-pool resource experiments carried out in late 2005 in both the old and new commons (Vollan, 2008). In these experiments groups of ve people were confronted with a social dilemma situation where the social optimum could be reached if all ve group members kept a low number of livestock, while keeping as many livestock units as possible was the dominant strategy for each participant. After 10 rounds people could vote secretly for a communication rule, an enabling external reward or a restrictive external penalty rule to be implemented for another 10 rounds. Table 2 shows the summary statistics of the experiment and the respective voting results. Taking into account the lack of social cohesion which impedes monitoring in the new commons, we see that people in the new commons indeed prefer external monitoring and rule enforcement, while people in the old commons that have higher social cohesion strongly prefer traditional ways of solving problems through face-toface communication and deliberation. The participants tried to build up trust through communication since their experiences with outside interventions were negative. The characterizations suggest that communication within groups is strongly prevalent among the majority of people in the old commons of Namaqualand. People in the new commons who favor external rule enforcement also have a higher degree of trust in the police (v2 = 8.3; n = 151; p < .01) and judiciary (v2 = 6.9; n = 151; p < .01) or the factor new institution (v2 = 3.1; n = 151; p < .1). When asked who makes the decisions for their area, all of them named the municipality, while in the old commons of Leliefontein respondents named variously the community, committees, and the municipality. This reects to some degree a lower trust in the problem solving capacity of the community in the new commons. Summing up there is a remarkable parallel in the analysis of the strength and weaknesses of the communities and the aggregated voting results. Both analyses suggest a greater demand for site-specic interventions with external assistance in creating social capital in the areas without a history of past cooperation. 5. CONCLUDING REMARKS The well-established literature has observed the links between social capital and natural resource management (Pretty & Ward, 2001, p. 220), between social capital and provision of public goods (Alesina & La Ferrara, 2000), and between social capital and development (Knack & Keefer, 1997). Here I highlight the interdependence of social capital and decentralization and especially between social capital and delegation or devolution. This case study from Namaqualand conrms the importance of the relationship between the community and the public infrastructure provider and argues that it is critical for eecting cooperation. It is a relationship driven mainly

by the obligation placed on the ocials to consult and involve the communities. Reality in Namaqualand is following a rational choice approach of bureaucracies. The easiest way to fulll the obligation of a bottom-up process is to appoint a single purpose committee in the community that is easier to control and work with than the elected ward committee. While the facilitation process mostly follows a blueprint procedure, the eciency of each specic committee was not explored in detail. There is anecdotal evidence from user committees pointing toward insucient management support from the outside organizations, unclear or too little delegation of tasks and decision-making power, insucient nancial resources as well as embezzling of money by leaders. On the basis of a household and community survey in a former colored reserve of Namaqualand, I observe that unemployment is a major driver for having a high number of user committees in a village. Most likely, a high unemployment in villages also weakens the negotiation power of the community toward the infrastructure provider such that villages with high unemployment might end up with a high number of committees that are also dysfunctional (insucient decision-making power and resources). Besides the committee specic problems there are also community wide eects. When controlling for unemployment there remains a signicantly lower level of norms of trust and reciprocity in villages with a high number of committees. This suggests that in villages with many committees the trust-generating function of the committees (i.e., platform for communication and repeated interaction where parties follow their commitments) does not work as intended. With a higher number of committees transparency and coordination is (almost automatically) decreasing. More independent units need to coordinate their eorts, more meetings are needed, and often this results in unclear leadership. Also elite capture might increase due to the lack of transparency and accountability. Platteau and Gaspart (2003) argue that a high number of community-based development aid projects increases the pressure to establish partnerships with communities quickly, and elite capture becomes more likely. Another point made in the case study is that (monetary) benets people derive from the user committee is a precondition for building social capital, given the high unemployment and assuming that these committees are often initiated without appropriate participation, dialog, and training. This nding is in line with the studies of Attanasio et al. (2009) and Feigenberg et al. (2010), which found that social capital, was generated via meetings but in relation to cash transfers or credit supply. While bringing paid jobs to the communities had no negative eects on social capital of the respondents in this sample, one can imagine possible ones. For example, paying people for collective tasks could raise expectations of externally driven bought participation instead of encouraging self-mobilized voluntary collective action. And with the focus on short-term incentives it could be harder to persuade communities to engage in creating long-term benets (e.g., from conservation). If the monetary benets do not materialize moral-based institutions such as trust and reciprocity are

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767

likely to be eroded. Thus, there are negative externalities between outside initiated paid collective action and selfgovernance. The Namaqualand case study presented here suggests that devolution and delegation of tasks might be harmful to communities because of spillover eects from one domain to another. The negative externalities from devolution might be heaviest for communities that rely to a large degree on cooperation between users, as is the case for people living in the old commons of Namaqualand. However, the example of the old and new commons shows how social context and history have created dierences that are still inuencing the management of devolution processes today. It turns out that social cohesion is much higher in the old commons, where people learned to cooperate over time. However, past dependency still negatively aects the fundraising willingness in the old commons. The dierence between the old and new commons also shows up in the way they choose dierent institutional solutions to problems in a social dilemma experiment. Both analyses suggest a greater demand for external assistance in creating social capital in the areas without a history of past cooperation. Simply implementing blueprints for delegation through single purpose committees is not eective, since dierent communities have dierent skills and resources and delegation and devolution requires site specicity and a high degree of social contextual understanding from the implementing or facilitating organization. The ndings presented in this paper should not be understood as criticism of devolution per se but rather of uncoordinated devolution following blueprints for committee establishment. It strongly depends on the attitudes of those instituting and facilitating the committees whether social capital might be build or not. According to Tyler (2002) leaders who create the right attitudes and values achieve cooperation in groups easier than leaders who rely on incentive based instruments. However, external agents implementing structural social capital should understand under what conditions social structures generate benecial outcomes for the society as a whole, not only for those people they are working with. The role of committees for society at large has to be looked at with greater concern, and integrated approaches with consistent policy measures of devolution, decentralization, and poverty reduction should be intensied. Approaches that convey one coordinated village agenda do exist and have been used by the Desert Research

Foundation (DRFN) in Namibia with great success. For example, their Forum for Integrated Resource Management (FIRM) focuses on sectoral cooperation instead of sectoral competition in the communities. All stakeholders and partners in development sit on one platform at the request of one focal community and address the issues raised by that community (Kruger, 2003, p. 15). In the South African context only a strengthened ward committees could serve as such a platform. The single-purpose committees in its current form destabilize the ward committee as they work unobserved and are detached from the control of the ocial structure (the ward committee or the municipal council) (see also Manor, 2004). Manor (2011) highlights the possibility of municipal committees that are organized around a central elected body and subcommittees (education, health, etc.). Although the coordination problem is not completely solved in the latter model, the responsibilities are clear and the municipal committee might develop a stronger sense of community. In contrast to hierarchical solutions of public administration is the view that decentralization should be the emergent result of a polycentric, competitive process (Ostrom, Tiebout, & Warren, 1960). In a polycentric system municipal tasks are divided at dierent levels and multiple, formally independent decision-making centers overlap, compete, and cooperate with each other. Whether the current situation in the Namaqualand represents a (benecial) polycentric situation is dicult to judge. There are overlapping structures and competing organizations since many single purpose committees already existed prior to the establishment of the ward committees in 200102. However, the ward committee has no formal decision-making power or responsibility. Consequently, some councilors do not take the ward committee seriously and do not show up to scheduled meetings. In the Namaqualand, one necessity for a functioning polycentric system is to devolve decision-making power to the ward (and other) committees. Only if committees have the power to take decisions, they can form ecient partnerships with service providers, ministries, and NGOs and thus can decide which institutional arrangement is best suited for a specic task. This would be an investment in the future: there would be transaction costs at the start, but these would decrease once local governance was consolidated. Most likely, this would also result in a stronger enforcement of rules in the committees making committee members more accountable, both to the community and to the government, for the actions they take.

NOTES
1. Sixty three of 75 developing and transitional countries with more than 5 million inhabitants claim to transfer power to local governments (Ribot, 2004). Decentralization is the relocation of administrative functions away from a central location, and devolution the relocation of power away from a central location. Power can be equated with the capacity or authority to contribute to decision-making (Meinzen-Dick, Di Gregorio, & Dohrn, 2008). The terms devolution and delegation are very similar and both apply to single purpose committees. However, in the case of delegation one remains responsible for ensuring that the person to whom one has delegated a task can and does perform it. 2. This eect has been reported in naturally occurring eld settings(Frey, Oberholzer-Gee, & Eichenberger, 1996; Gneezy & Rustichini, 2000 ; Titmuss, 1970) and in experimental eld laboratories (Cardenas, Stranlund, & Willis, 2000; Vollan, 2008). 3. Equivalent to 126 USD at the average exchange rate of 1 ZAR = 0.158 USD for 2005. 4. Ostroms claim for a more realistic behavioral theory of human action is based on her initial work dening design principles for sustainable common-pool resource management (Ostrom, 1990, 2007). Among attributes of resource users that increase the likelihood for successful collective action she mentions past cooperation, trust, and social capital. 5. In Steinkopf the largest settlement 30 households were surveyed. In Soebatsfontein (the only village that has not owned land before) we aimed to have a complete census of all households. 6. The villages Kheis and Klipfontein were not included since the numbers of interviews in the village were too small to aggregate.

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WORLD DEVELOPMENT 10. Such behavior was observed for example in Komaggas, where a separate Komaggas citizens association was formed in addition to the elected ward committee. In Komaggas, 92% of respondents said the community made the decisions in the area, but 84% said they were never involved when decisions were made. In addition, Cousins (1996, p. 16) describes the factional politics that arise with the establishment of rival committees in Namaqualand. 11. The commons it has today (15,069 ha) was sold from the mining company De Beers to the municipality of Kamiesberg and given to Soebatsfontein in March 2000 and up to 15 families started farming.

Kharkams was excluded as being too large and close to the main road with dierent livelihood strategies available for the inhabitants. 7. As there is no correlation between trust and unemployment (0.06; p = 0.4) and reciprocity and unemployment (0.02; p = 0.8) on household level the above analysis is not biased (i.e., lower trust and reciprocity due to higher unemployment). 8. The provision with basic infrastructure is low in all villages. For example from the 497 residents of Paulshoek, 23% had piped water in the yard, 19% had brick houses, 13% a pit latrine and 4% had a telephone in their house. 9. The question was: To how many village meetings did you go in the last 12 months?

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APPENDIX A See Tables 3 and 4. APPENDIX B. SUPPLEMENTARY DATA Supplementary data associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2011. 09.016.

Table 3. Upper table: overview of the household data aggregated on village level. Lower table: community level data of the villages included in the household survey: their number of committees and reported meetings with ocials and in the community according to a community level survey Village Ocial data Municipality Kharkams Kheis Klipfontein Paulshoek Soebatsfontein Spoegrivier Tweerivier Bulletrap Komaggas Steinkopf Average Kamiesberg Kamiesberg Kamiesberg Kamiesberg Kamiesberg Kamiesberg Kamiesberg Nama Khoi Nama Khoi Nama Khoi Size 1291 448 466 497 246 460 207 357 3314 7256 1454 N 15 4 5 19 35 13 12 8 13 27 15.1 Number of committees Kharkams Kheis Klipfontein Paulshoek Soebatsfontein Spoegrivier Tweerivier Bulletrap Komaggas Steinkopf Average Kamiesberg Kamiesberg Kamiesberg Kamiesberg Kamiesberg Kamiesberg Kamiesberg Nama Khoi Nama Khoi Nama Khoi 1291 448 466 497 246 460 207 357 3314 7256 1454 9 9 10 7 7 14 13 6 5 9 8.9 Men (%) 47 100 60 32 40 38 25 100 38 81 51 Age 51.5 50,7 39.2 42.2 45.8 47.7 43.7 51.6 47.6 44.7 Household survey Years in village 41.7 48.5 34.2 34.3 33 42.7 26.9 17.3 35.6 28.7 Income 1138 655 1706 935 1268 1047 765 1698 1817 1976 1349 Meetings with municipality 2 2 4 4 2 2 4 2 2 4 2.8 Employed (%) 13 0 40 11 22 23 8 50 46 63 30 Meetings with NGOs 5 2 4 5 1 5 0 0 2 6 3

46.1 33.4 Community level survey Meetings of ward committee 15 12 5 24 4 12 12 2 12 12 11

Number of groups and associations 10 5 6 4 4 7 5 4 7 20 7.2

Notes: (a) Age, years living in village and education measured in years. (b) Percentages relate to the total number of interviewed people in the household survey. (c) Monthly income includes remittances, part-time jobs, and permanent income as stated by the interviewee.

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WORLD DEVELOPMENT Table 4. Summary statistics of the social capital survey (n = 151, see Supplementary appendix for questionnaire) Minimum Maximum 93 1 11 12 93 2 1 1 1 1 4080 2 3 3 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 Mean 46.15 .49 4.67 6.85 33.42 1.19 .21 .33 .30 .15 1349.4 .34 .36 .30 .57 .52 2.57 2.91 2.56 2.49 2.45 2.70 2.12 2.33 2.40 Standard deviation 14.30 .50 2.10 3.26 18.89 .39 .41 .47 .45 .36 1087.8 .58 .67 .57 1.19 1.29 1.12 0.86 1.19 1.05 1.17 1.14 1.01 1.22 1.14

Socio demographic Age Gender (female = 1) Household size Education in years Local attachment Years living in village Other place to stay Occupation Unemployed Pensioner Permanently employed Farmer Economic situation Individual income (month) Collective action and trust Group member Committee member Regional organization Days unpaid collective action Days paid collective action Community trust Reciprocity Factors (percentiles) Civic engagement Satised with rules Network resources Social cohesion Fundraising willingness Trust local institutions Trust new institutions

19 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 0

Notes: (a) Age, education, and years living in village are measured in years. (b) Female, other place to stay, occupation variables, are categorical variables. (c) Monthly income includes remittances, part-time jobs, and permanent income as stated by the interviewee. (d) Membership in organization: the number of dierent organizations the respondent belongs to. (e) Community trust is measured as 1 = nobody, 2 = few, 3 = many, 4 = most. (f) Reciprocity is an additive index (see description in text). (g) Collective work is measured on a scale from 0 = 0 days, 1 = 1 day, 2 = 24 days, 3 = 58 days, 4 = more than 8 days.