Picking Winners or Making Them? Evaluating the Social Capital Impact of Community Driven Development (CDD) in Thailand

Abstract

This paper evaluates how a community driven development project in Thailand impacts social capital by using quantitative and qualitative analytic techniques. Propensity score matching and semi-structured interviews are some of the techniques that are used to investigate whether treatment villages differ significantly in their social capital characteristics from matched comparison villages. The results show that villages with more trust and stronger norms of collective action were more likely to participate, which may suggest that the project acted as a mechanism to select these social capital characteristics. Moreover it appears like the project enhanced other social capital characteristics, such as information sharing, leadership, and empowerment. The presentation is accessible to readers with an intermediate level of statistics. A prior exposure to propensity score matching is helpful but not strictly necessary.