This paper explores how communities select their Community-Driven Development (CDD) proposals and how CDD resources are allocated across villages. In particular, the author assess whether resources reach the poorest villages. The author also explores how household preferences are aggregated at the community level. The analysis is conducted in the context of a CDD project in the Philippines, the KALAHI-CIDSS with data covering 1,200 randomly selected households in 66 villages in 8 of the municipalities that took part in the project. The author believes that the paper makes some interesting contributions to the literature and to knowledge on optimal design of CDD operations. Firstly, the analysis improves upon previous research by combining detailed ex-ante data on both household and village official's preferences regarding the most pressing development problems, with data on the type of project the community requested from a CDD project. As such, it is possible to assess whether projects selected actually reflect communities' preferences. Secondly, the data examined in this paper covers communities that did and did not receive funding for their proposals. Decisions on which proposal to fund are made by village representatives at a meeting organized by each participating municipality. Thirdly, the data has been collected in the context of the KALAHI-CIDSS, a CDD operation in the Philippines with clear and detailed rules on how to select project proposals and on how to access funds. This allows for a more rigorous analysis than previous studies that tended to focus on social funds, a type of CDD operation in which rules for project selection were not always very clear.
