Participation of beneficiaries in the monitoring of public services is increasingly seen as key to improving their efficiency. In India, the current government flagship program on universal primary education organizes community members, specifically locally elected leaders and parents of...

The promise of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) is that evidence gathered through the evaluation of a specific program helps us — possibly after several rounds of fine-tuning and multiple replications in different contexts — to inform policy. However, critics have pointed out that a...