We now present three brief case studies illustrating ways in which mixed method approaches have been used in developing countries.

# _Indonesia: The Kecamatan Development Project_

The Kecamatan Development Project (KDP) in Indonesia is one of the world’s largest social development projects. Implemented in the aftermath of the Suharto era and the East Asian financial crisis in 1998, KDP was primarily intended as a more efficient and effective mechanism for getting targeted small-scale development assistance to poor rural communities, but it was also envisioned as a project that could help to nurture the proto-democratic state at the local level. KDP requires villagers to submit proposals for funding to a committee of their peers, thereby establishing a new (and, by design, inclusive) community forum for decision making on development issues (Guggenheim 2006). Given the salience of conflict as a political and development issue in Indonesia, a key evaluation question is whether these forums are in fact able to complement existing local-level institutions for conflict resolution and in the process help villagers acquire a more diverse, peaceful, and effective set of civic skills for mediating local conflict. Such a question does not lend itself to an orthodox standalone quantitative or qualitative evaluation, but rather to an innovative mixed-method approach.

In this instance, the team decided to begin with qualitative work, since there was relatively little quantitative data on conflict in Indonesia and even less on the mechanisms (or local processes) by which conflict is initiated, intensified, or resolved<sup>13</sup> . Selecting a small number of appropriate sites from across Indonesia’s 3,500 islands and 350 language groups was not an easy task, but the team decided that work should be done in two provinces that were very different (demographically and economically), in regions within those provinces that (according to local experts) demonstrated both a “high” and “low” capacity for conflict resolution, and in villages within those regions that were otherwise comparable (as determined by propensity-score matching methods) but that either did or did not participate in KDP. Such a design enabled researchers to be confident that any common themes emerging from across either the program or non-program sites was not wholly a product of idiosyncratic regional or institutional capacity factors. Thus quantitative methods were used to help select the appropriate sites for qualitative investigation, which then entailed three months of intensive fieldwork in each of the eight selected villages (two demographically different regions by two high/low capacity provinces by two program/non-program villages).

The results from the qualitative work – useful in themselves for understanding process issues and the mechanisms by which local conflicts are created and addressed (see Gibson and Woolcock 2008) – fed into the design of a new quantitative survey instrument, which will be administered to a large sample of households from the two provinces and used to test the generality of the hypotheses and propositions emerging from the qualitative work. A dataset on local conflict was also assembled from local newspapers. Together, the qualitative research (case studies of local conflict, interviews and observation), the newspaper evidence, data on conflict from nationallevel surveys and key informant questionnaires provided a broad range of evidence would was used to assess the veracity of (and where necessary qualify and contextualize) the general

> 13 The details on this methodological strategy are provided in Barron, Diprose and Woolcock (forthcoming).

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