Can public policies achieve high compliance without resorting to high enforcement? The case of India's mandated corporate social responsibility law shows that they may be able to do so by leveraging the underlying motivations of policy targets. The law, introduced in 2013, requires large companies to spend at least 2% of their net profits on CSR. Despite no monitoring, enforcement, or penalties for noncompliance, it has resulted in significant increases in CSR spending by creating a social norm around the 2% target, and relying on social pressure and reputational effects, rather than government enforcement, for compliance. However, the case also shows that such an approach has attendant risks: relying on the social motivation of policy targets may alienate those with normative motivations, and weaknesses in the surrounding legal and institutional environment may enable some firms to disguise their noncompliance.
India institutionalized school-based management in 2009 by requiring all government schools to constitute school management committees, primarily staffed by parents, that would make decisions on school-related issues. This article utilizes school-level panel data from the state of Uttar Pradesh and uses a matched difference-in-difference estimation methodology to examine the effect of this policy on the provision of basic school infrastructure and services in government schools. It finds evidence that the policy resulted in improving the provision of libraries and medical checkups for students.
Motivation: The adoption of school-based management (SBM) reforms has led to the formation of local-level school committees in many low-and middle-income countries. These committees are usually created with the stated aim of giving parents or local community members a greater say in school management. Various studies have, however, highlighted difficulties with parental and female participation, casting doubt on the extent to which greater community representation improves school management. Purpose: The article examines empirically whether greater parental and female representation in Indian school management committees (SMCs) is associated with school improvement as measured by increases in the school-level provision of basic infrastructure and services. Methods and approach: Fixed-effects regression models are estimated using school-level panel data. Findings: I find that increased parental representation is not associated with improvements in school infrastructure/service provision. Rather, what contributes strongly to improved outcomes is increased representation of elected local authority members. Overall, schools with female-majority SMCs also perform better.
School-based management reforms continue to be popular in developing countries, but they may have the effect of increasing educational inequalities if (a) advantaged schools adopt them early while disadvantaged schools do not, and (b) they lead to quality improvements in adopting schools. It is therefore instructive to examine the adoption behavior of advantaged and disadvantaged schools. This article examines the correlation between aspects of school (dis)advantage and the time to adoption of school-based management arrangements in Indian government schools. It finds that better-resourced schoolsthose with greater levels of school infrastructure and more educated teachersdid adopt faster. On the other hand, keeping everything else constant, schools catering to rural and socio-economically disadvantaged communities also adopted faster. The results suggest that low levels of school resources pose barriers to early adoption, and hence effective embedding of SBM reforms is likely to require targeted support for poorly resourced schools.
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