STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Governments and nongovernmental organizations around the world utilize community-driven development (CDD) approaches to address complex and overlapping development challenges.
- CDD approaches have a strong track record of effectively improving basic services and in some cases also improving economic welfare and participation outcomes.
- The next step in evaluating and learning from CDD programs is to better understand the conditions under which they work and how well they perform in specific contexts. This will require diverse research approaches.
Summary
Given the size and scope of CDD investments, and its popularity among governments as a development tool, it is imperative to interrogate CDD’s impacts and ensure best practices are integrated into current and future projects. As of June 2023, the World Bank alone supports over 350 CDD or CLD projects in 98 countries with approximately USD 45.2 billion. The CDD approach has evolved to meet new challenges and opportunities, resulting in projects that include components on devolved financing, household cash transfers, local economic development, climate mitigation and adaptation, and inclusion.
This paper calls for a revitalized learning agenda on CDD that focuses on the conditions under which CDD can work and the design and implementation choices that will make CDD most effective within a given context. CDD approaches have a strong record of improving basic services and in some cases also improving economic welfare, participation, and conflict-mediation outcomes. Even as they explicitly harness existing (or establish new forms of) social institutions, however, it is less clear that CDD projects discernably expand social networks and decisively shift pro-social norms – and indeed whether it is desirable that they should singularly expect to be able to do so in such relatively short timeframes. More importantly, many key questions remain unanswered, especially on how variation in project design, implementation modalities, and interactions with contextual factors affect CDD outcomes.
The paper identifies gaps in the evidence on CDD and outlines a research agenda to build knowledge on CDD’s impacts across four outcome categories, based on three sources of variation. The paper focuses on four outcomes tied to social sustainability — cohesion, inclusion, resilience, and process legitimacy — because social sustainability is critical to development and because less is known about CDD’s impacts on social sustainability compared to economic sustainability. Three sources of variation likely contribute to these and other CDD outcomes, including variation in project design, implementation approaches, and context. A diverse range of tools and methods are required to systematically assess how these sources of variation affect CDD outcomes.