Winning Hearts and Minds through Development: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Afghanistan

Abstract

Development programs have been increasingly used not only as an instrument for economic and political development, but also as a tool for counter-insurgency. Using a large-scale randomized field experiment in Afghanistan, we explore whether the inclusion of villages in the country’s largest development program alters perceptions of well-being, attitudes towards the government, and levels of security in surrounding areas. We find that the program has a positive effect on all three measures in relatively secure regions, but no effect on attitudes and security in areas with high levels of initial violence, suggesting that a certain minimum threshold of security has to be in place for the provision of goods and services to have an effect on improving attitudes towards the government and reducing violence