Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

While being often pursued as a desirable state of society or community, social cohesion can be a double-edged sword. Especially when it comes to Community-Driven Development (hereafter CDD) where community members are expected to collaborate for their co-prosperity, social cohesion would be a matter of not only “WHETHER it is needed or not” but also “WHEN it is needed or not”. Put it another way, “In CDD program, what factors lead social cohesion to be constructive or destructive?” Answering this question that has been seldom answered by both scholars and practitioners in community development policies, this study examines a rural CDD case implemented by Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) and Myanmar Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Irrigation (MOALI).

KOICA has been supporting a CDD program in 100 villages across nine regions in Myanmar since 2014 in order to apply South Korea’s successful rural development model “Saemaul Movement” to Myanmar’s rural areas. The villages participating in the CDD program are supposed to manage their own development projects in three domains: (1) living environment improvement, (2) capacity building, and (3) income generation. As a result of the annual evaluation based on key performance indicators, each village is rewarded in proportion to its relative achievements.

As dependent variables in this study, we collect three types of performance outcomes of each village: (1) performance score, (2) performance rank, and (3) performance grade (A, B, or C). For independent variables, we surveyed the five major stakeholders in each of 100 villages’ CDD governance—village chief, CDD program chair, project leader, religious leader, and local government official. The respondents answer their assessments on the three categories: (1) relationship among governance members (i.e., centrality, trust), (2) program performance (i.e., estimation of performance, impacts of program, prospect of program), and (3) program process (i.e., planning, attribution, efforts, improvement, communication, implementation).

Using the collected data, we examine the impacts of village members’ assessments (in terms of cohesion among members) on their villages’ CDD performance outcomes. The preliminary analyses imply some common patterns of village cohesion behind successful CDD performances: (1) co-existence of physical and mental preparedness, (2) diverse roles shared by multiple leaders, (3) balance between optimistic and realistic prospects, (4) long-term horizon of planning, (5) introspective attribution of challenges, and (6) constructive divergences in goal setting and attribution of performance. Based on the findings, the study suggests the theoretical implications and practical conditions of “situationally balanced cohesion” in community development.