Flows, leaks and blockages in informational interventions: A field experimental study of Bangalore's water sector

Abstract

a b s t r a c tMany policies and programs based on informational interventions hinge upon the assumption that providing citizens with information can help improve the quality of public services, or help citizens cope with poor services. We present a causal framework that can be used to identify leaks and blockages in the information production and dissemination process in such programs. We conceptualize the ''information pipeline" as a series of connected nodes, each of which constitutes a possible point of blockage. We apply the framework to a field-experimental evaluation of a program that provided households in Bangalore, India, with advance notification of intermittently provided piped water. Our study detected no impacts on household wait times for water or on how citizens viewed the state, but found that notifications reduced stress. Our framework reveals that, in our case, noncompliance among human intermediaries and asymmetric gender relations contributed in large part to these null-to-modest results. Diagnostic frameworks like this should be used more extensively in development research to better understand the mechanisms responsible for program success and failure, to identify subgroups that actually received the intended treatment, and to identify potential leaks and blockages when replicating existing programs in new settings.

Voter information campaigns and political accountability: Cumulative findings from a preregistered meta-analysis of coordinated trials

“…What explains the weak overall effect on voter behavior of these common, potentially scalable informational interventions? There are many necessary steps in a causal chain linking information to voters’ decision-making process and, ultimately, to greater political accountability ( 13 , 24 ). In our studies, information existed and was disseminated.…”

Comparing utility-reported hours of piped water supply to households’ experiences

“…While utilities report their average supply duration, it is not clear what this average represents, For example, it could represent the hours a pump is operated at a water treatment plant or the average duration experienced by households at the end of the network. Utilities could better capture continuity of supply through reporting by utility workers responsible for turning supplies on and off (i.e., valve operators), although the reliability of data collection through field utility employees has been challenging to maintain in practice 32 . Utilities could regularly survey or collect customer complaints regarding supply continuity by randomly selecting households for in-person or phone-based surveys.…”

“…Households that know exactly when to expect water, and can therefore plan household activities and be home when the water is arriving, will have a different level of water access than those who do not know when water will be delivered and spend scarce resources on alternative water sources or miss work to wait for the arrival of water 6 . Notifications of when water in an IWS would be delivered were associated with modest reductions in stress in low-income households 32 .…”

An agenda for the study of Public Administration in Developing Countries

“…Recent research designs do this explicitly, by pairing quantitative evaluations of a randomized control trial with qualitative case studies that use process tracing to uncover how an outcome was achieved. For instance, Kumar, Post, and Ray (2018) evaluate an intervention intended to reduce waiting times for water. Ethnographic research from Hyun, Post, and Ray (2018) explains the lackluster intervention results, in part, because bureaucrats resisted changes to the core duties of their jobs.…”