| This study asks why levels of cooperation for public goods provision vary in similar, impoverished communities facing shared environmental and economic challenges. It argues that the structure of development aid that communities receive provides an answer. In communities where aid reduces residents' short-term economic risk by diminishing household income volatility, they neglect "horizontal" reciprocal relationships that traditionally mitigate economic risk and instead rely upon "vertical" relationships with aid donors. In contrast, in communities where aid funds projects that do not reduce income volatility, like education and infrastructure, residents continue to cultivate horizontal relationships. Maintenance of horizontal relationships correlates with community-wide cooperation and with pessimism about the future, while neglect of horizontal relationships correlates with an inability to cooperate and with optimism. I argue that residents' behavior and attitude patterns are both explained by the importance they place on short-term economic risk reduction. Where recipients perceive aid as risk-reducing, they see reciprocity and cooperation as less critical to survival and public goods provision suffers. Using the example of pastoralist Mukogodo Maasai communities in Kenya, this study demonstrates the preceding relationships with evidence from original, cross-community survey data about attitudes, about reciprocity, and about maintenance of social order, as well as with ethnographic and observational data. Data from an Ultimatum Game experiment reinforce the conclusions drawn via the other methods. The findings demonstrate that development aid can alter local social and economic relations in unintended ways. |
