State-Building, Collective Efficacy, and the Co-Production of Public Goods in Rural Africa

Collective efficacy—the shared expectation that a community can coordinate around desired outcomes—is critical for understanding development in rural Africa, where villagers often shoulder the brunt of local development initiatives. We argue that distinct modes of state-building generated uneven endowments of collective efficacy in the hinterlands of African states: more interventionist state-building oriented political action upwards towards the state, undermining local collective efficacy. Using original data from the Ghana-Togo borderlands, we show that collective efficacy is systematically higher and collective action more common in rural Ghana, where state-building efforts from the colonial era onward have emphasized local action. In contrast, Togolese have faced a more interventionist state. This relationship is robust to several confounding factors, and we document similar dynamics across the Nigeria-Benin border, as well as sub-nationally within Ghana. Our findings hold important implications for both the current embrace of participatory development and recent scholarship on state-building and historical legacies.