Explaining Divergent Effects of NGO Schools on Government Schools in Rajasthan

• In Event: By Sword and Market: The Comparative Politics of Education Regimes

Abstract

NGOs have increasingly become central actors in the provision of basic public services in developing countries, alongside the state, yet the effects of these actors on state service provision remain poorly understood. Service-provision NGOs may build state capacity by providing demonstration models to the state and stimulating new demand for quality services, or they may erode state service delivery by stimulating exit from the public sector and weakening oversight of government services by mobilized citizens. Recent empirical scholarship has documented instances of both, but has not offered a systematic explanation for this heterogeneity. This paper investigates this question in the context of rural schools in northwest India. In a pair of matched villages in Rajasthan, nearly-identical NGO schools had divergent effects on the performance of nearby government schools. Drawing on a range of qualitative evidence collected in the villages over the course of five months, as well as interviews, documents, and data from the NGO’s urban headquarters, this paper examines the conditions that drove these divergent effects in otherwise similar contexts. I find that the NGO schools’ effects depended on patterns of corruption among teachers—the street-level bureaucrats of the education system—in the government schools. The paper traces these patterns of corruption among teachers to the broader political context of electoral capture and the obstacles to citizen claim-making in India. The evidence also suggests that, as a whole, the NGO schools had a regressive distributive effect on the performance of government schools, making the ex-ante best schools better and the worse schools worse. The case suggests that NGOs—and those who fund them—can better avoid displacing welfare states when they attend to patterns of bureaucratic corruption in public service institutions and the politics that hold them in place.

When NGOs deliver services in developing countries, what happens to the delivery of public services by the state? Using evidence collected during 13 months of fieldwork in India, this book presents a comparative case analysis of the effects of education NGOs on local government schools in rural Rajasthan and rural Punjab. The book argues that the key factor that matters in shaping NGO effects on the state is the extent to which informal institutions within the state education bureaucracy encourage street-level bureaucrats to seek rents. Where informal institutions encourage bureaucratic effort, the presence of NGOs improve public service delivery through a “learning effect.” Where informal institutions encourage rent-seeking, NGOs erode state performance by inducing exit. The evidence presented in this paper underscores the importance of informal institutions in mediating the effects of NGOs on the state, and highlights the trade-offs NGOs may face between short-run welfare provision and long-run state-building.

Author

• Emily R. Clough, Northeastern University