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Public Works Programmes: Review of their effectiveness and empirical essays on their contribution to climate resilience and social cohesion

  • Poverty, underemployment, lack of infrastructure, low agricultural productivity, degradation of natural resources, climate change, and eroding social cohesion are among the biggest challenges that many low and lower-middle income countries are facing. Objectives linked to addressing these pressing challenges have been ascribed to public works programmes (PWPs). These are social protection instruments which offer remuneration (in cash or kind) for vulnerable people in exchange for temporary work on labour-intensive low-skill activities with social benefits. PWPs are being implemented in around two out of three developing countries. Given the substantial amounts spent on PWPs, it is critical to know to what extent the expectations towards them are backed by evidence. This dissertation sheds light on this overarching question with three self-contained essays. The first essay synthesises the evidence from PWPs in Sub-Saharan Africa, guided by three questions: First, what can we infer from the available impact evaluations regarding thePoverty, underemployment, lack of infrastructure, low agricultural productivity, degradation of natural resources, climate change, and eroding social cohesion are among the biggest challenges that many low and lower-middle income countries are facing. Objectives linked to addressing these pressing challenges have been ascribed to public works programmes (PWPs). These are social protection instruments which offer remuneration (in cash or kind) for vulnerable people in exchange for temporary work on labour-intensive low-skill activities with social benefits. PWPs are being implemented in around two out of three developing countries. Given the substantial amounts spent on PWPs, it is critical to know to what extent the expectations towards them are backed by evidence. This dissertation sheds light on this overarching question with three self-contained essays. The first essay synthesises the evidence from PWPs in Sub-Saharan Africa, guided by three questions: First, what can we infer from the available impact evaluations regarding the effectiveness of PWPs as a social protection instrument? Second, what do we know about the role of the wage vector, asset vector, and skills vector in this respect? Third, what can we infer about the role of design features in explaining differences in outcomes? The other two essays use empirical evidence from Malawi to address more specific questions regarding the potential of PWPs to strengthen climate resilience and the relationship between PWPs and social cohesion. What sets the evidence synthesis in my first essay apart from existing reviews of PWPs is that it accounts for their heterogeneity by systematically differentiating results by PWP type and outcome area (income, consumption and expenditures, labour supply, food security, nutrition, asset holdings, agricultural production and techniques, and education). Programmes that offer short-term ad-hoc employment (Type 1) are distinguished from programmes that offer more predictable employment over longer periods (Type 2). For the review of impacts, this paper relies solely on (quasi-)experimental studies, but for the analysis of the role of design factors also on other literature. In line with existing reviews, my results suggest that Type 1 programmes can effectively enable consumption smoothing in the wake of acute crises, whereas in contexts of chronic poverty, Type 2 programmes perform, on balance, better. Offering complementary access to extension services in Type 2 programmes can boost impacts further. However, in all cases, evidence is too scant and mixed to safely conclude whether the higher benefits of costlier PWP types justify the cost premium. The second essay investigates the potential of PWPs to strengthen climate resilience. Among the main social protection instruments, the biggest potential to strengthen climate resilience is often ascribed to PWPs if they create climate-smart community assets and transfer knowledge of climate-smart practices. Yet, there is a lack of evidence whether design changes to this end can indeed enhance the contribution of an existing PWP to climate resilience. I use a difference-in-differences approach based on two-period panel data to analyse how a modified PWP model performs compared to the standard model of Malawi’s largest PWP after 24 months. The key modification is to embed public works in a communal watershed management plan with a strong emphasis on collective action and capacity building. I find that the modified approach considerably increased communal watershed management activities through voluntary labour contributions on top of the paid public works labour. While this increase was mainly driven by PWP participants, non-participants also made substantial contributions. I also find a small increase in the adoption of soil and water conservation practices on respondents’ private land, especially by non-PWP participants. These findings imply that such modest changes can make PWPs climate-smarter. In particular, they can broaden the engagement in and adoption of climate-smart activities beyond the group of PWP participants. The co-authored third essay investigates the relationship between Malawi’s MASAF PWP and social cohesion, specifically within-community cooperation for the common good. Like the existing studies, we face the challenge that neither the assignment of the programme to communities nor the selection of individual participants is randomised. We try to mitigate the endogeneity concerns by triangulating fixed effects panel analyses for a set of outcomes and sectors using two datasets with different units of analysis (households and communities). We find that public works are positively associated with coordination activities and voluntary (unpaid) contributions to public goods, along both vertical ties (between community members and local leaders) and horizontal ties (among community members). Especially for school-building activities, voluntary inputs in the form of labour and other in-kind contributions are higher in the presence of the public works programme. Our results contribute to a better understanding of the link between social protection programmes with community-driven features and social cohesion. Overall, the findings of the three essays in this dissertation contribute to the knowledge base regarding effectiveness and potential of PWPs across a broad range of outcome areas. Specifically, they offer new insights how to harness the potential of PWP to strengthen climate resilience and into the seemingly positive relationship between PWPs and social cohesion. The findings can help researchers and policy makers who are interested specifically in PWPs or in any of the many objectives that can be pursued through PWPs.show moreshow less

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Author:Stefan Beierl
URN:urn:nbn:de:bvb:739-opus4-10491
Advisor:Michael Grimm
Document Type:Doctoral Thesis
Language:English
Year of Completion:2021
Date of Publication (online):2022/02/21
Date of first Publication:2022/02/21
Publishing Institution:Universität Passau
Granting Institution:Universität Passau, Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät
Date of final exam:2022/02/02
Release Date:2022/02/21
Tag:Climate resilience; Public Works; Review; Social Protection; Social cohesion
Page Number:vii, 154 Seiten
Institutes:Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät
Dewey Decimal Classification:3 Sozialwissenschaften / 33 Wirtschaft / 330 Wirtschaft
open_access (DINI-Set):open_access
Licence (German):License LogoStandardbedingung laut Einverständniserklärung