My research interests revolve around the politics of development and foreign aid, including development and aid effectiveness measurements.
Fish Farm, Northern Samar, The Philippines
I am particularly interested in the political choices that drive decisions concerning both aid project evaluation at the micro level and development measurements at the macro level, as well as expanding micro-level development theory concerning the role and incentives of local actors in development projects. To this end, I engage with interdisciplinary literature on development, institutions, organizations, effectiveness studies, and the political economy of evaluation/measurement. I have done field work in the Philippines, Washington D.C., Costa Rica, and Mauritius, as well as public opinion surveys with U.S. and Indian populations.
Summaries of some projects are given below. For my CV, please contact me at jrogla@gmail.com or through the Contact Page.
Publications
Roglà, J. (Forthcoming). “Agency and the Global South: The Power of Local Actors in International Development Cooperation.” In T. Lembe & A. Kulnazarova (eds), The Agency of the Global South in International Politics. New York, USA: Palgrave Macmillan.
International development practices have undergone substantial change over the past two decades. Changes are in part driven by the rise of powerful nonstate donors with innovative financing models and transparency demands, and recipient-turned-donor states like China who challenge traditional Western aid models and jeopardize the hegemony of long-established donors. I argue these macro pressures have amplified the power local actors hold in development cooperation. Donors have moved away from fungible aid given to recipient governments, taking a more ‘local’ turn via participatory approaches where community-level beneficiaries identify needs and apply for funds. Underlying this turn is the idea that recipient-led projects will create more sustainable outcomes, revealing the power donors believe locals have over aid effectiveness. This power, however, is not yet accounted for in political analyses of international development, where the focus is on the donor. Nevertheless, local actors’ power is likely to increase over time given the growing pressure on aid agencies to improve transparency and effectiveness. Based on 35 interviews in Costa Rica, the Philippines and Washington, D.C., with multilateral, bilateral, and NGO aid practitioners and their local partners, I provide evidence of the ways that local actors exercise power over donors, employing a four-part power classification proposed by Wrong (2017) to illustrate. This evidence also shows that when locals use their power, the consequences can range from simple project adjustments to prison time and the content of project evaluations is unclear, posing new challenges for development aid effectiveness under this ‘local’ approach.
Research Assistant: Jesúa Reyna Méndez
Roglà, J. (2022). “Navigating the Ethics of Human Subjects Research.” In R.J. Huddleston, P. James, & T. Jamieson (eds), The Handbook of Research Methods in International Relations. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing.
What are the main ethical concerns in research and how do we navigate them? This chapter is meant to guide researchers to answer these two questions and encourage reflection on them in their studies. In Part I, I will identify those main ethical concerns. In Part II, I will discuss how to address these concerns during the research design process to avoid exploiting your participants. In Part III, I will give guidance on navigating formal ethics approval processes, including determining any additional ethics requirements you are subject to in other countries and indigenous lands. In Part IV, I will discuss ethics in the field, such as recruitment, how to think through the issue of researcher positionality, exceptions to confidentiality, and the ethics of website/social media posts about your research. In Part V, I will discuss some final reminders when describing your results to reinforce informant protections.
MacArthur, J., Sattar, R. A., Carrard, N., Kozole, T., Nicoletti, C., Riley, L., Roglà, J., Toeur, V., & Willetts, J. (2022). Six principles to strengthen qualitative assessments in development interventions. Development in Practice, 11.
Qualitative research and evaluation is often described as an art rather than a science. This intangible nature has left many programme teams feeling uncertain about how to justify and use qualitative forms of assessment in their monitoring, evaluation, and learning practice. Existing guidance is theoretically based and often focused on applications in the Global North. Building on an expressed need for guidance from a community of practice in Asia and the Pacific, this collaborative action research process aimed to create practical and tested guidance for programme teams. The analysis was conducted as part of a Cambodia-based sanitation programme assessment. Drawing from literature and the collaborative process, we propose a set of six principles to guide insightful, practical, and robust qualitative assessments. We provide examples regarding how the principles can be used to plan, conduct, and review qualitative assessments with a goal to strengthen the future use of qualitative tools in programming.
Under Review
Abdel Sattar, R., Roglà, J., Toeur, V., Kozole, T., Nicoletti, C., Harper, J. (Under Review). Effects of Climate Vulnerability on Sanitation Access, Sanitation Infrastructure Functionality and Households’ Sanitation Practices in Rural Cambodia.
Kozole, T., Ross, M., Nicoletti, C., Roglà, J., Ives, N., Ali, A., Ratsamnang, P. (Under Review). Impact of Targeted Subsidies on Access to Resilient Sanitation for Climate-Vulnerable Households in Rural Cambodia.
Harper, J., Abdel Sattar, R., Kozole, T., Toeur, V., Roglà, J., Ross, M., Ives, N., Pruitt, H., Soneja, P., Capone, D. (Under Review). Household Perceptions, Practices, and Experiences with Real-world Alternating Dual-Pit Latrines Treated with Storage and Lime in Rural Cambodia.
Harper, J., Abdel Sattar, R., Kozole, T., Toeur, V., Roglà, J., Ross, M., Ives, N., Pruitt, H., Soneja, P., Capone, D. (Under Review). Microbial Hazards in Real-world Alternating Dual-Pit Latrines Treated with Storage and Lime in Rural Cambodia.
Projects
Bribri Indigenous Territory, Talamanca, Costa Rica
The Role of Local Actors in International Development: How Individual Incentives Affect Foreign Aid Effectiveness (Dissertation)
Background: The goal of my research is to analyze the micro-level variables that shape development aid project outcomes in a targeted country. I posit that the type of incentives that induce local actor ‘buy-in’ into foreign-funded development projects relate directly to the sustainability of outcomes, namely that nonmaterial incentives will lead to longer-lasting outcomes.
Method: I conducted archival research, field observations and interviews on the implementation and outcomes of four foreign aid projects executed between 1992-2016 in Costa Rica and Mauritius and developed a new measurement tool for project outcomes and incentive types.
Results: The use of nonmaterial (social) incentives by institutions to induce local actor `buy-in' into foreign-funded development projects lead to longer-lasting project impacts, though the e ffect is mediated by which type of local actor was targeted.
Implications: This study allows us to better understand the conditions under which aid is effective in the long-term, and conceptualize and operationalize aid effectiveness beyond the macro-level. The results offer clear policy impacts and innovative scientific evaluation tools in the arena of international aid and development.
Research Assistants: Riley Mallon, Jesúa Reyna Méndez, Claudia Rojas Rios, Andrés Madrid, Natalia Ruiz Guevara, Hannah Rae Warren, Juan Martín Gutiérrez Trejos
World Bank, Washington, D.C., USA
The Political Economy of Impact Evaluation: Which World Bank Projects Get Evaluated? (Co-authors: Vincenzo di Maro, Dan Honig, Brad Parks)
Background: When do international development organizations – and more specifically their personnel – decide to subject their projects to rigorous impact evaluations? Despite incentives against it, we have witnessed a rapid increase of these impact evaluations in the international development sector since 2000, but there is little systematic research on the determinants of selection into impact evaluation.
Method: Using quantitative techniques to analyze World Bank projects carried out between approximately 2014-2018, we put forward new theory and an analysis of the project and project leader characteristics that are associated with selection into the impact evaluation process.
Implications: A better understanding of these factors offers us novel insights into the political economy of impact evaluation in international development organizations, and provides decisionmakers with new evidence on the determinants of evaluation adoption.
Research Assistant: Eric Teschke
Bribri Indigenous Women’s Sustainable Tourism Project, Yorkin, Costa Rica
Beyond Donor ‘Success’ or ‘Failure’: A New Tool to Evaluate Development Project Outcomes
Background: When evaluating development projects, the concepts measured by traditional development indicators (i.e. economic growth, poverty levels, life expectancy) are subject to local, domestic, and international forces that may have nothing to do with the project, leaving us little recourse to separate out project effects. Measures additionally rely on donor interpretations of ‘success’ or ‘failure’ in reaching their goals, which may not be the desired outcomes for all actors involved.
Method: To address this deficit, I have combined a multidisciplinary literature review, field work in three world regions, and interviews with development professors and practitioners to create a new project outcome measurement that evaluates the level to which project activities have been institutionalized.
Implications: Such a process-based measurement can help advance development theory, link micro to macro aid effectiveness outcomes, and avoid the trap of Rocha de Siqueira’s (2017) 'good enough' numbers used by international organizations.
Research Assistants: Jesúa Reyna Méndez, Andrés Madrid
Inter-American Development Bank, Washington, D.C., USA
Leveraging Aid Transparency for Political Gain: Project Evaluations as Donor Bargaining Chips in International Cooperation Negotiations
Background: Evaluation has become a way for traditional donors to set themselves apart in an increasingly crowded field, used as a way to signal their commitments to recipients. Thus, regardless of outcomes, we should see more published evaluations for development projects where the donor can leverage maximum political gain. I propose three hypotheses: we should see more projects with published evaluations 1) in low income countries that are politically unaligned with the donor, 2) in the health sector and more broadly the social sector, and, 3) when implemented by a third party other than the recipient government.
Method: I examine the case of USAID projects (1997-2010), and find support by estimating two logit regression models.
Implications: The results of this project have important implications for theoretical issues concerning the political economy of measuring aid effectiveness, as well as the future of the current evidence-based policymaking trend in aid.
