An Ethnography of Endogenous Institutional Change in Community-Driven Development

Community-Driven Development (CDD) empowers target communities with control over development resources but is criticized for exogenously establishing parallel governance structures that fade away when the intervention ends. Could an unconditional direct transfer to a whole community catalyze endogenous institutional change by creating ‘a distinctive social space’ where actors draw upon modern and traditional discourses in the struggle over resources, institutions, and meanings? In this ethnographic study, we provided a Malian village with $10,000 for a ‘development project’ and used the Actor-Oriented Approach to investigate how the project was socially constructed. The results reveal the local elites (customary authorities) taking early control over the project funds, and countervailing powers (young men and a “righteous” elder) constraining the customary authorities after they had sufficient time to mobilize opposition. Our findings suggest that issuing unconditional direct transfers could enable CDD to positively impact governance outcomes in other West African villages as well.