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Abstract
Collective action can help individuals, groups, and communities achieve common
goals, thus contributing to poverty reduction. Drawing on longitudinal household
and qualitative community data, the authors examine the impact of shocks on
household living standards, study the correlates of participation in groups and
formal and informal networks, and discuss the relationship of networks with access
to other forms of capital. In this context, they assess how one form of collective
action, iddir, or burial societies, help households attenuate the impact of illness.
They find that iddir effectively deal with problems of asymmetric information by
restricting membership geographically, imposing a membership fee, and conducting
checks on how the funds were spent. The study also finds that while iddir help poor
households cope with individual health shocks, but shows that the better-off
households belong to more groups and have larger networks. In addition, where
households have limited ability to develop spatial networks, collective action has
limited ability to respond to covariate shocks. Therefore, realism is needed in terms
of the ability of collective action to respond to shocks, and direct public action is
more appropriate to deal with common shocks.