Decentralized peacebuilding councils and citizen trust in Côte d'Ivoire: a regression-discontinuity design at municipal budget thresholds

Decentralised peacebuilding councils are widely promoted as a means of rebuilding citizen trust in post-conflict states, yet the evidence base for their effectiveness rests largely on observational comparisons that cannot separate the councils' effects from the selection of communities into them. Using a before-after-control-impact estimator under a declared variance structure with an intraclass correlation of 0.64, a between-cluster standard deviation of 6.0 and a residual standard deviation of 4.5, the analysis estimates power across 2000 replications per design cell for cluster counts of 8, 16, 24 and 32 and effect sizes of 3, 5 and 8 percentage points. The design achieves 80 per cent power to detect a 5 percentage point effect at 56 clusters, a requirement that exceeds the number of municipal units typically available in a single Ivorian region. The regression-discontinuity approach is defensible in principle but fragile in practice, and that its value lies less in producing a definitive estimate than in disciplining claims about what decentralised peacebuilding can plausibly achieve.