facilitation and planning – e.g., elite capture, stigma against vulnerable and marginalized groups); (iii), gender, age, and ethnic background – which can play an important role for particular aspects of facilitation, such as promoting gender equality; (iv) whether the facilitators are a cadre hired, trained, and managed by government institutions or whether the facilitation role is a specialized function outsourced to an NGO (or UN agency, which is often the case in FCV); and (v) the supervision structure in place for facilitators to deal with challenging aspects of their work, and coaching/mentoring arrangements to uphold team morale. How these choices influence quality of implementation is key to answering the question of when and how CDD programs can deliver on intended results.<sup>42</sup> Considerably more research is needed in this area.

There are other operational choices which may affect how project designs shape the likelihood of achieving desired outcomes. Another important dimension of design likely to lead to significant variations in outcomes – including in terms of process legitimacy and trust in government – are issues related to the flow of funds, systems for effective community procurement (where relevant), and those for ensuring quality assurance (e.g., engineering support, quality control of investments and/or market assessments, technical trainings, and market linkages for CDD programs focusing on livelihood interventions). Design choices in these areas – especially the compatibility of government systems with project procedures that enable r funds to flow, the establishment of clear operational procedures for financial management and procurement, and the outsourcing of (or in-house capacity for) specialized technical roles – can significantly impact the credibility of programs.

Secondly, _fidelity to design during the implementation_ of projects is a likely source of variation in impacts. CDD projects present specific challenges when it comes to ensuring that processes laid out during the design phase are followed through – particularly when it comes to facilitation and the participatory process. This is particularly true for large-scale, national CDD platforms where there might important trade-offs between getting to scale and maintaining the initial intensity of the intervention as designed. CDD programs cover large areas with investments that are spread out and which employ a very large numbers of facilitators, hence relying to a significant extent on the training of community groups and volunteers. There is a level of design complexity required for programs that have the explicit goals of including marginalized and vulnerable groups in decision-making for example, or those that focus on building climate resilience by integrating available national/sub-national data on climate vulnerability and community knowledge of climate risks (which likely reside in very different epistemological spaces). To understand variation in CDD impacts (again within specific sub-types of projects aiming at the same type of result) it will be critical to understand the extent to which design choices have been translated into practice as intended yet still locally accepted. Expanding/standardizing the use of process evaluations in CDD programs is an important step in assessing fidelity to design and ensuring that implementing agencies can take timely corrective action. For example, a process evaluation of the Philippines _NCDDP_ showed significant discrepancies between the participatory planning cycle as designed and as understood and implemented in practice by community facilitators. Assessing the effectiveness of quality assurance mechanisms put in place at the project level (supervision, community-based monitoring, training and coaching of facilitators, technical oversight of infrastructure investments) through qualitative analysis and process monitoring, and creating feedback loops with implementation, must be an important part of a future research agenda. This is needed so we can gain a better understanding of the causal transmission

> 42 See Bold et al (2018) for a formal assessment of the different outcomes attained in an identical education program (itself previously determined to “work” in India as a result of an RCT) implemented in Kenya by two different organizations (the government and an NGO).

25