Can Information Campaigns Overcome Political Obstacles to Serving the Poor?

An innovative instrument that development practitioners and policymakers are experimenting with is to spread information about public service delivery through grassroots “campaigns”, to mobilize citizens to demand better services from public providers. However, new political economy research suggests that the impact of such campaigns is limited by the extent to which they influence overall political incentives of governments to serve the poor. This paper proposes a new type of information campaign with the potential of strengthening political incentives by generating yardstick competition across political jurisdictions, and voter coordination in evaluating governments on the basis of improvements in actual development outcomes. The paper argues that experimenting with such a campaign would be valuable because if it works it is a specific instrument that international and local development agencies could use to address often intractable political obstacles to serving the poor. Address for correspondence: 1818 H Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20433 Ph: 202-458-1129; Fax: 202-522-1154, Email: [email protected] I am grateful to Shanta Devarajan, Karla Hoff, Philip Keefer, Santhosh Mathew, Ingrid Widlund, and other workshop participants at EGDI for helpful comments. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views of the World Bank, its Executive Directors, or the countries they represent.