# **6. Conclusion**

Existing empirical literature suggests that economic and socio-cultural heterogeneity can impose significant costs on collective capacity to provide public goods and can exert a direct influence on the distribution of benefits and costs associated with any given public good. For instance, given varying preferences and command over resources, men and women may well obtain different net benefits from the provision of public goods, even if they are part of the same household. In addition to generating different net benefits across members, heterogeneity can increase transactions costs of negotiating and enforcing agreements to provide public goods.

The negative effects of heterogeneity can be mitigated through a composition of local leadership that reflects the underlying heterogeneity in the community population, and similarly through active participation of members with different interests in community life. Both mechanisms could improve the ease with which the distributions of costs and benefits across individuals in the community are assessed, and could facilitate the accommodation of heterogeneous interests, while lowering the costs associated with negotiating, monitoring and enforcing agreements underling collective action for public good provision.

On the whole, the theory suggests that broad civic participation is indicative of viable, wellfunctioning local institutions that facilitate collective action, and is key to equitable realization of benefits associated with participatory development efforts and sustainability of accrued benefits. This paper conceptualizes in a theoretical model the factors that underlie collective action capacity for public good provision, provides empirical tests of the hypotheses stemming from the theoretical model, and estimates, in a Two-Stage Least Squares framework, the impact of collective action capacity for public good provision on community median estimates of maize yield and household consumption expenditures per capita in rural Malawi.

Our results confirm the importance of having women in leadership roles and in being active members in local organizations. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that women’s representation and voice enables communities to negotiate and enforce agreements to provide public goods. The same holds true for having young adults actively participate in organizations and have representation in leadership. However, in Malawi, there is no statistically significant impact of leadership that better reflects ethnic composition of the community. In addition, communities that have more educated leaders – both absolutely and relative to the underlying population –have greater provision of public goods. The results also show that greater public goods provision increases agricultural productivity and consumption per capita. Taken together, these results reinforce the premise that greater representation and participation leads to better outcomes for community members.<sup>20</sup>

> 20 Even with (i) the data-intensive nature of our study that brings together a rich set of household survey, geospatial and administrative data, and (ii) the theoretical arguments that are put forth in defense of our instruments and that

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