Public work programs and social capital: an exploration of NREGA in India

Description

Evaluations of public programs typically focus on whether policies achieve their intended outcomes and the pathways through which such changes occur. For instance, Desai et al. (2015) examine the multiple ways in which the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) has influenced labor markets, education, health outcomes, and broader development indicators. However, as development programs increasingly adopt community-driven and participatory approaches, an important yet underexplored question concerns their impact on social capital within communities. In this paper, we address this gap by examining the effects of MGNREGA on social capital in rural India, using multiple waves of data from the India Human Development Survey (IHDS). While fostering social capital is not typically an explicit objective of public policy, existing literature suggests that development outcomes are often more effectively achieved in the presence of strong social capital (Helliwell and Putnam, 1995). Despite this, there remains limited understanding of the causal relationship between public policies and social capital formation. We leverage the demand-driven nature of MGNREGA, which generates variation in program uptake across households, to identify its impact on social capital. By comparing participating households with non-participating ones before and after the program’s implementation, we assess changes in community-level interactions and trust. Although MGNREGA was not explicitly designed to build social capital, we argue that it may generate such outcomes as an unintended consequence of its community-based income generation structure. This study thus contributes to a broader understanding of how public policy interventions can influence social and institutional dimensions of development beyond their primary economic objectives.

Publication Date

1-1-2017

Keywords

Social capital, Public work, Public policy

Conference

Population Association of America Annual Meetings, 25-27 April, 2017, Chicago

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