it wrong, or at a minimum, under-estimated how long it would take for the political effects of CDD interventions to spill-over into other spheres.<sup>5</sup> What might have happened?

One hypothesis is that thus far, these CDD interventions remain isolated in vertical programs of specific line ministries while not fully being integrated into other sectors. CDD is thus only one of many interventions occurring at the local level which influences community norms, networks, and behaviors. For example, the education ministry will not use community councils to discuss school maintenance issues, and the agricultural ministry will not make use of village development plans or locally organized community councils to guide agricultural user groups.

If the hypothesis is correct that we see few spillovers because government bureaucracies project their own ministry’s rule systems and defend them against intrusions from other ministries, then a corollary is that as we see national CDD programs becoming legitimized through village laws and sectoral programs (like education) we should now see both top-down and bottom-up pushes to spread participatory planning more broadly. That is, the reason for the lack of spillover to date is not because CDD did not generate “enough” social capital, but because the barrier to spillover was government norms, not community values.<sup>6</sup> There are other hypotheses for why we are not yet seeing more governance spillovers. Some governance specialists believe that shifts in local governance and social transformation take much longer to materialize and involve more complex causality than the timeframes and measurement models that most development actors are comfortable with. These changes in norms and attitudes take generations to shift and are likely to involve other

> 5 Caution about premature conclusions is warranted in this area. Problems arise not just from the very small sample of programs that have tried to measure governance spillovers, but from other methodological problems, such as limited sampling and high geographical and social variance across communities. Thus, for example, while Beath’s randomized control trial of Afghanistan’s NSP program found few spillovers in the central region of the country where most of his measurements were concentrated, working in the northeast, Gozstoni and Kohler found that “CDCs have become a firmly established feature of village-level governance in the region.” Accordingly, 72 percent of respondents assessed the head of the _shura_ (CDC) as the most powerful person in the village, while 72 percent also believed that the decisions of the CDC _shura_ were in the public interest (and not in the interest of a few powerful households). Lastly, CDC conflict resolution was evaluated rather positively: 33 percent and 32 percent of respondents respectively believed that the CDC always or often resolved conflicts in a just way. The results for the perceptions of state-provided district-level governance are less positive.

> 6 This is the hypothesis behind Afghanistan’s 2016 Citizen’s Charter, a cross-cutting presidential initiative that aligns all major service delivery ministries behind the community councils created by the National Solidarity CDD project.

22