Does Community-Driven Conflict Resolution Work? Evidence from RCT in Ivory Coast

• In Event: Experiments on Communities and State Capacity

Abstract

Much of the scholarly works on community-driven post-conflict peace and development so far have focused on the effectiveness of Community-Driven Development (CDD) projects. There is relatively less research on the efficacies of the Community-Driven Conflict Resolution (CDCR) project in mending relations between ethnic groups in divided communities. In 2013, the United Nations funded a CDCR project among randomly selected communities of West Ivory Coast. As a part of the project, key community members organized and participated in conflict resolution training workshops; devised community safety plans; and disseminated the knowledge to other members in the communities. In this paper, we assess the effectiveness of the project in bringing behavioral changes among community members using behavioral games conducted in a lab-in-the-field setting. We complement the findings from the game with the end-line household surveys in treatment and control communities. Our initial findings indicated that CDCR projects helped break the cycle of distrust in the communities and reduced the incidents of ethnic violence. We revisited the communities after 14 months to reevaluate the sustainability of the project's impact and found that the distrust levels had scaled back. We argue that in the absence of institutional mechanisms to capitalize on the initial gains, social cohesion among treated communities tends to slide back and converge with control group communities.

Authors

• Anup Phayal, University of North Carolina Wilmington

• Prabin Khadka, University of Essex