7 - Decompressing Legacies of Public Goods Delivery, 1880–2012

Summary

One of the central claims of this study is that the impact of informal social institutions is contingent on the formal institutional environment they operate within. This chapter looks at the historical trajectory of basic public goods investments in Senegal from the onset of colonial rule in 1880 to the present to evaluate this claim by extending the dataset on village-level public goods access backward in time to the onset of French colonial rule using archival data and ministerial reports. By so "decompressing" history, the analysis unpacks spatial and temporal processes to isolate the 1996 decentralization reforms as the moment that precolonial legacies emerge to shape the spatial distribution of local public goods access. At the same time, the historical dataset allows me to take into account prominent historical alternative explanations that suggest enduring colonial legacies might supersede the precolonial effects I document. I find that the colonial past did matter, but that its effects on access to rural public goods have largely faded by the era of decentralization.