sample. Villages were selected on the basis of the location of “interesting” conflict cases identified in the qualitative research, using detailed criteria aimed at making it easier to control for non-program effects.<sup>25</sup> Within each of these settings, a team of twelve researchers and three supervisors conducted nine months of qualitative fieldwork in 41 villages. They developed 68 case studies of conflict pathways, which explored the evolution of specific conflicts, some of which became violent, others not.<sup>26</sup> The cases covered a wide range of disputes, including land and natural resource conflicts (which range from large ethnic conflicts to private conflicts over inheritance), cases of vigilante justice (against thieves, witchdoctors, etc.), gang fights, political disputes (e.g., over local elections and administrative boundaries), conflict over access to and the management of development resources, and domestic and sexual violence. The researchers also collected rich ethnographic material on topics ranging from how local governments function, to local socioeconomic conditions, to the role of traditional and religious leaders, to allow for cross-village comparison. In all, over 800 interviews and 100 focus group discussions were conducted.

A number of quantitative surveys and data sources were also used. A key informant survey was conducted in the research villages to gather comparable responses to perception questions relating to KDP, its effect on conflict, and processes of social change in both ‘project’ and ‘comparison’ sites. A dataset of conflicts as reported in newspapers was created to assess patterns and forms of conflict, and variations between areas, a method similar to that applied by Varshney (2002) in his work on India, but using newspapers at a lower level of geographic specification, with the result that we found impacts from conflict six times that of best previous estimates.<sup>27</sup> Two other ‘larger-N’ surveys were analyzed: the Government’s _Potensi Desa_ (PODES) survey, which provides information on conflict for all 69,000+ villages in Indonesia; and the World Bank’s Governance and Decentralization Survey (GDS).<sup>28</sup>

# **5. When Are Projects Part of the Problem?**

A central thesis of this study is that development (and development projects) and conflict inevitably go hand in hand. KDP may have negative impacts on local conflict and conflict management capacity, in ways that are direct and/or indirect; the introduction of new resources into poor areas, for example, can and has led to heightened inter-group tensions. Programs like KDP, which aim to empower marginalized groups, also introduce new rules and norms about decision-making procedures, and, in so doing, impact on local power balances and social structures. Resistance from elites to such changes is another basis for conflict and a common

> connections, motivation of leaders, etc) in shaping project selection, a weakness we sought to correct by tapping into the local knowledge of our research team: we thus used PSM to identify three “statistically comparable” program and comparison sub-districts ( _kecamatan_ ) and then deferred to the insights of our local research team to narrow this down to a more specific and context-specific ‘match’.  The variables used in the PSM process measured: population, access to markets, presence of department stores, health and education resources, income, and perceptions of poverty level.

> 25 See Barron, Diprose, Madden, Smith and Woolcock (2004).

> 26 The cases will soon be available on the project web-site: <u>www.conflictanddevelopment.org</u>

> 27 The results are published in Barron and Sharpe (2005); Varshney, Panggabean and Tadjoeddin (2004) previously used newspaper mapping to map patterns of collective violence in Indonesia.

> 28 We do not draw on these latter two sources in this paper.  Future work (including Barron, Diprose and Woolcock 2006) will make use of these data.

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