Community-driven development, governance, and collective action: Overview of the evidence

As foreign aid declines, which interventions should we prioritize? Advocates of community-driven development (CDD) have long argued that we should ask this question of the communities and people whom aid is meant to serve.

CDD provides village-level grants and facilitation that support communities in choosing and implementing the projects they consider local priorities, including basic health and education services, local infrastructure, income-generating activities, or other community priorities. In recent years, a growing body of evidence has begun to document and assess the effects of this approach. This brief and a companion brief1 synthesize findings from a range of rigorous evaluations to describe what we know about the multidimensional impacts of CDD in low- and middle-income contexts and highlight gaps that should be addressed in future research. Here, we focus on the effects of CDD on governance and collective action.