Does Service Predictability Affect Household Welfare and State-Society Relations? Field Experimental Evidence from Bangalore’s Water Sector
Alison Post, Assistant Professor of Political Science, UC Berkeley
Throughout the developing world, intermittency and unpredictability are the hallmarks of public service delivery. Yet the causes and consequences of unpredictable public services have received much less attention than patterns of access to, or government expenditures on, these services. Through a cluster-randomized experiment in Bangalore, we examine the effects of introducing a text-message based notification scheme providing households with advance warning of the timing of water services. We assess whether the NextDrop notification system reduced the time spent waiting for water, expenditures on substitutes for piped water services, and stress levels on account of uncertain and irregular deliveries and uncertainty. We also examine if the receipt of real-time information changed how citizens “see the state,” whom they hold responsible for service quality and problems, and whom they approach about service concerns. Surprisingly, we find that while the service worked well when piloted in a smaller city, the notifications had little impact when rolled out in Bangalore. We attribute this divergence primarily to a lack of cooperation by street level bureaucrats (SLBs) in the new urban and organizational context. The fact that the same development intervention performed so well in one context and so poorly in another underscores the importance of systematically investigating the extent to which SLB cooperation drives both positive and negative results in experimental studies.
Alison Post is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Global Metropolitan Studies. Her research lies at the intersection of comparative urban politics and comparative political economy, with regional emphases on Latin America and South Asia. It examines several related themes: the politics of regulating privatized infrastructure, the varying ability of subnational governments to provide infrastructure services effectively following the decentralization wave of the 1990s, and the politics of urban policy more broadly. She is the author of Foreign and Domestic Investment in Argentina: The Politics of Privatized Infrastructure (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and articles in Desarrollo Economico, Politics & Society, Studies in Comparative International Development, World Development, and other outlets. She has been named a Clarence Stone Scholar (an early career award) by the Urban Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. Her doctoral dissertation, “Liquid Assets and Fluid Contracts: Explaining the Uneven Effects of Water and Sanitation Privatization,” won the 2009 William Anderson award from the American Political Science Association for the best dissertation in the general field of federalism, intergovernmental relations, state or local politics. She has served as a a Marshall Scholar, a postdoctoral research scholar with the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University, a Visiting Researcher at the Centro de Estudios de Estado y Sociedad in Buenos Aires and the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (E.C.L.A.C.) in Santiago, and as a Researcher at L.S.E. Urban Research in London.