Such political economy arguments suggest that government bureaucracies may be ill equipped to improve the quality of public services. This has led development practitioners to believe that the involvement of beneficiaries is essential to make services work for poor people. Development projects funded by international organizations are increasingly required to include “beneficiary participation” components, such as the constitution of users’ committees, parents-teachers associations, etc. or, where such institutions already exists, interventions aimed at mobilizing people to make them more effective. The World Bank’s World Development Report “Making Services work for Poor People” describes a range of alternative institutional designs that enable beneficiaries to exercise better control over the quality of services that they are receiving (World Bank, 2004).

Despite this enthusiasm, and some encouraging experiments we describe below, whether any types of external interventions actually affect participation by beneficiaries, and whether this participation can in turn improve public services, remain largely open empirical questions. It is challenging to answer these questions definitively because there is no single leading candidate for what encourages beneficiary participation and/or makes it more effective. At a very minimum, there are at least two dimensions along which interventions designed to promote participation can (and do) vary. First, community members might either be able to intervene directly to improve service delivery (by contributing additional inputs, by punishing or rewarding the agents, etc.) or they may only be able to intervene indirectly (say by contributing to a fund that is administered by some bureaucrat or complaining to the agent or the agent’s supervisor).<sup>5</sup> Second, community members might be able to exercise control (direct or otherwise) individually or as a part of a small group (for example they may ask to be paid for the work they did on the local road project), or it may require joint action by some larger group.<sup>6</sup> Both the direct and indirect dimensions allow for continuous variation, creating a continuous plane of possible models of popular participation. The different models have their advantages and disadvantages: for example, direct control opens the door for capture of the entire process by a locally dominant group. This is what happened in the sugar cooperatives in Maharasthra, India (Banerjee et al., 2001). Indirect controls, such as complaint systems, have the advantage that it is possible to bypass the local elites, but at the cost of potential slippage (the complaint may get lost or ignored). Small groups require less coordination to exercise control (and hence are less subject to coordination failures), but large groups make sense when the good is not excludable, and complaints are less likely to be ignored when they come from a large enough group.

This paper reports on a randomized experiment in the state of Uttar Pradesh (UP) in India that compared a number of alternative models within the same setting. Much of the experiment leverages the Indian federal government’s flagship current program on elementary education, the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA). This program, under which the federal government will contribute 65 percent of the educational budget in UP in 2007-08 (22,374 million rupees or 559 million dollars), gives a prominent role to the Village Education Committees (VECs). The VEC is a body consisting of three parents, the head-teacher of the village school and the head of the village government, which is supposed to be the key intermediary between the village and the district educational authorities. The VEC is supposed to exercise both indirect control (by monitoring the performance of the schools, reporting problems to higher authorities, and requesting additional resources), as well as some direct control (by deciding whether the contracts of the existing community-based

> 5 The World Development Report (2004) calls these respectively the “short route” and the “long route” to control.

> 6 There is actually a natural third dimension: there may be specific, pre-specified mechanisms for the exercise of control, or the precise mechanics may be left to the community to determine. This is potentially very important, but impinges less on the issues emphasized in this paper.

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