Decentralization with Guardrails: Enhancing the Zambia Constituency Development Fund

While decentralization potentially aligns public expenditures with local preferences and bolsters political accountability, weak states face risks of elite capture and limited local administrative capacity. However, empirical evidence on these tradeoffs is limited by the typically “all-or-nothing” nature of decentralizing reforms. In Zambia, the Constituency Development Fund (CDF), used to support capital expenditures on local public goods, has been vastly increased since 2021. In partnership with the government, for the 2025 cycle we have implemented an at-scale field experiment varying districts’ effective control over community development projects. From 86 districts in our sample, 37 are assigned to a bundled treatment that both devolves full project selection authority and expands access to simplified local bidding rather than lengthy national competitions for tenders.

Following a one-year extension of the intervention in October 2025, we seek funding to allow for a continuation of our existing co-funded data collection operations over the upcoming election cycle. Leveraging substantial original data sources, we will provide rare experimental evidence on how decentralization affects (i) alignment between citizens’ local demands and selected projects, (ii) political participation and electoral accountability, (iii) procurement costs and leakages, and (iv) ultimate project completion and service delivery outcomes.