The Collaborative Governance thematic stream working group invites you to a webinar with Tara Grillos, titled “Collective Decision-Making and Local Public Goods â Experimental Evidence from Kenya”.
đī¸ Monday, 27 October 2025
đ 09:00 Arizona / 17:00 CET / 18:00 CAT
đ Register to attend here
During this webinar, Tara will discuss evidence from two closely related experiments (with co-author Michael Touchton), one in the lab and one in the field. Both take place in the context of local public good provision in Kenya, where the constitution requires some form of citizen participation in government spending decisions and where the creation of local public goods is still quite salient due to a lack of basic infrastructure such as potable water systems.
Tara will present data on the achievement of more socially optimal outcomes from the laboratory setting and on behavioural measures of long-run collective action from the field setting. The findings highlight tradeoffs in institutional design and suggest that practitioners and policy-makers should employ more demanding procedures only when they stand to be particularly impactful.
âšī¸ More information on the guest speaker:
Tara Grillos is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Purdue University and co-director of the JMK Experimental Social Science Research Lab. She received her PhD in Public Policy from Harvard University and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado’s Institute of Behavioral Science. Grillos teaches courses on environmental policy, causal inference, and experimental methods. Her research focuses on the human dimensions of sustainable development policy. She is interested in questions of participation, deliberation, collective action, and public goods provision, particularly with respect to natural resource dilemmas in developing countries.
