1 2/10/08 When Does Community Conservatism Constrain Village Organizations? by Tanguy Bernard*, Alain de Janvry**, and Elisabeth Sadoulet** February 2008 Abstract Formal village organizations (VO) can be classified into market-oriented (MO) and community- oriented (CO) organizations, with the former aimed at raising members’ incomes and the latter at the provision of local public goods. This paper investigates the role of community conservatism in opposing economic differentiation and, thereby, constraining the emergence, configuration, and activities of MOs in West Africa. To do this, we develop a model where we show that, if these conservative forces are important, MOs need to be larger than would otherwise be optimal in order to gain acceptability and emerge. This, in turn, has an impact on their governance structure, as the needed extra members demand a more participatory decision-making process in order to secure the delivery of club goods, constraining the exercise of leadership. With very high resistance to economic differentiation, no MO can emerge. We test the predictions of this model on a dataset of 647 VOs in Burkina Faso. Results show that the emergence of MOs, their initial size and governance structure, and their initial activities are indeed affected by conservative social pressures and that these effects are large enough to make a difference on the role of MOs in development. * International Food Policy Research Institute; t.bernard@cgiar.org. ** University of California at Berkeley; alain@are.berkeley.edu; sadoulet@are.berkeley.edu. The authors are grateful to Marie-Hélène Collion, Pierre Rondot, and Adama Touré from the World Bank and to Jean-Louis Arcand and Maguelonne Chanron from CERDI for their collaboration on this project, as well as to Gershon Feder and the Norwegian Trust Fund at the World Bank for financial support. We also thank Jean-Philippe Platteau, Marcel Fafchamps, John Gibson, Nancy Mc Carthy, and Jordan Chamberlain for valuable comments.