Mobilizing for Entitlement: A Randomised Evaluation of a Homestead Land Rights Initiative in Bihar, India
研究评估了一项社会问责项目，通过动员村级组织帮助印度比哈尔邦的种姓农户获得宅基地土地所有权，发现该项目显著提升了土地安全和政府福利获取，但对住房投资影响不显著。
Across much of India, potentially transformative development programs are hampered by barriers to implementation. A case in point is Bihar, a province of over 100 million inhabitants, where state law guarantees each otherwise landless rural household the right to hold title over a plot of homestead land. Yet most eligible Scheduled Caste (SC) households remain untitled. This article studies a social accountability program that established, trained, and mobilised village-level community-based organisations to assist SC households in obtaining homestead title. The study employs a mixed methods design in which a survey-based field experiment estimates program impact while analysis of data from qualitative fieldwork documents ground-level processes. Results indicate that the program strongly increased land security and access to government entitlements, moderately increased asset ownership and homestead satisfaction, and had a weak positive effect on food security. However, the main impact estimates do not show statistically significant treatment effects on investment in dwellings or homestead -based livelihood activities. The qualitative analysis suggests that a key mechanism by which the program improved entitlement access was enabling target households to circumvent rent-seeking intermediaries. Results contribute to development studies research on social accountability, government service delivery, and land rights.