Pro - poor targeting and electoral rewards in decentralizing to communities the provision of local public goods in rural Zambia

Even though several studies have assessed the degree of progressivity in targeting communities under the participatory Social Investment Fund (SIF) approach to the provision of local public goods, there is yet little evidence on how increasing decentralization affects the quality of this targeting. We identify the impact of increasing decentralization on community targeting using the unique situation of Zambia’s SIFs where the degree of decentralization changed in time and space across districts over the 15 years of program implementation. We find that greater decentralization of SIFs’ functions to districts that had been deemed to have the necessary level of managerial capacity led to more progressive targeting across wards, mildly so at the national level and strongly so within districts. We also observe how local electoral politics gained importance with greater decentralization, with more votes received by the candidate from the majority party in the district council attracting more projects to a ward, and more projects in a ward rewarded by more votes for the councilor from the incumbent party. Decentralization thus made concerns with community poverty more salient in targeting and local politics more important in public goods allocation. 1 Authors’ email addresses are: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]. We are indebted to Vijayendra Rao and Craig McIntosh for useful comments and to the ZAMSIF teams in Zambia and at the World Bank for access to information and data.