Transparency ‘Fixes’ for Local Public Services : Field Experimental Evidence from Bangalore's Water Sector

Can providing citizens with information compensate for unreliable public services? We present a field-experimental evaluation of a program that provided households in Bangalore with advance notification of intermittently provided piped water. The implementers expected that increasing service predictability would reduce coping costs, increase transparency, and improve state-citizen relations. Our study, however, detected no impacts on household welfare or state-citizen relations. Non-cooperation by street-level bureaucrats charged with supplying water timing information undermined the program's viability. These findings suggest that greater attention be paid to how frontline workers drive experimental findings. We introduce a framework for analyzing “information pipelines” to enable such efforts