Working Together: Collective Action in Diverse Sierra Leone Communities

Scholars have pointed to ethnic and other social divisions as a leading cause of economic underdevelopment, due in part to their adverse effects on public good provision and collective action. We investigate this issue in post-war Sierra Leone, one of the world’s poorest countries. To address concerns over endogenous local ethnic composition, and in an advance over most existing empirical work, we use an instrumental variables strategy relying on historical ethnic diversity data from the 1963 Sierra Leone Census. We find that local ethnic diversity is not associated with worse local public goods provision across a variety of regression specifications, local outcomes, and diversity measures, and that these “zero” estimates are reasonably precise. We discuss the historical development of inter-ethnic relations in Sierra Leone, as well as the continued strength of local tribal chiefs as possible explanations for these perhaps unexpected findings. * We are grateful to the NBER Africa Group and the Harry F. Guggenheim Foundation for partially funding for this work. Some of the data used in this paper comes from the Sierra Leone Institutional Reform and Capacity Building Project (IRCBP) funded by the World Bank. We are grateful to the IRCBP and in particular the evaluation unit for allowing us to use this data. This work would not have been possible without the assistance, collaboration and input of John Bellows, Kate Whiteside Casey, Elizabeth Foster, Emmanuel Gaima, Peter Kainandeh, Philip Kargbo, Anastasia Marshak, Tristan Reed, Sarath Sanga, David Zimmer, and Yongmei Zhou, as well as colleagues in Statistics Sierra Leone. Seminar participants at the NBER Africa Group, the U.C. Working Group in African Political Economy, and Columbia Initiative for Policy Dialogue provided useful comments. All errors remain our own.