Peace agreement implementation sequencing and local political trust in Mali: a difference-in-differences analysis of decentralized governance reforms

Mali's 2015 Accord pour la Paix et la Réconciliation au Mali promised that decentralised governance reforms would rebuild local political trust in the north and centre. A decade later, trust remains contested and authority fragmented. the present analysis asks whether the sequencing of decentralised reforms relative to security consolidation can explain that disappointment. Because no commune-level panel of trust measures is available for the full implementation period, the study is framed as a design and power analysis rather than an empirical estimate. It specifies a before-after-control-impact (BACIP) estimator for staggered reform rollout across Malian communes, characterises its operating characteristics under a declared variance structure (between-cluster SD = 6.0, residual SD = 4.5, intraclass correlation = 0.64), and evaluates 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.54 clusters are required to detect a 5-percentage-point effect at 80 per cent power, a threshold that exceeds the number of communes in most plausible northern and central strata. The sequencing problem is real but that the evaluative infrastructure needed to adjudicate it is not yet in place, and it derives the design conditions under which future commune-level evaluations could distinguish early from late decentralisation.