The Role of Institutions in Providing Public Goods and Preventing Public Bads: Evidence from a Public Sanitation Field Experiment in Rural Kenya

Why are some communities able to prevent actions that harm the viability of public goods, while others are not? Why might the same set of institutions operate in very different ways in two otherwise similar communities? In this paper, I outline a theory that shows how the extent to which third-party governance is embedded in local norms and networks can explain variation in the availability of public goods and the effectiveness of law-enforcement institutions over space and time. Analysis of data from a large-scale field experiment supports some of the implications of this theory, showing that anti-littering rules enforced only by government agents are ineffective at motivating long-term behavior change. The more general theoretical implication of these findings is that formal enforcement does matter for public goods outcomes, but that third party enforcement institutions must be locally embedded in order to maintain the availability of public goods over time and that in some cases, sustained collective action may be an effective substitute for third party enforcement.