Inaccessibility and Compliance: Geography, Institutions, and Agency in Foreign Aid

Presented at the Individuals in International Policy Workshop (with Ben Gottfried).

Existing scholarship highlights that bureaucratic capacity is crucial to overcoming international development challenges. We argue that bureaucrats' impacts are often more conditional on geographic structures, such as physical inaccessibility. Underpinning our argument is a rational inattention mechanism: cost- and information-constrained bureaucrats focus their finite time on more solvable problems. By the same token, higher-quality bureaucrats retain some ability to mitigate structural constraints. We test our pre-registered hypotheses using data on project-level compliance with World Bank safeguard policies on resettlement, indigenous peoples, and the environment. We find that longer travel times for bureaucrats to monitor projects negatively affect safeguard compliance. Higher densities of projects within neighboring areas less consistently affect compliance, as density does not account for road infrastructure and state presence. Interaction analyses also confirm that the highest-quality bureaucrats only have some agency to overcome geographic structures. Given that our models address numerous inferential threats, including spatial autocorrelation, our results shed light on debates about the roles of geography, agency, and institutions in development. It is not only one factor or the other, but their interplay, that yields diverging outcomes. [Preliminary Draft Paper]