Do traditional chiefs improve or imperil development projects in their communities? The two rival perspectives on chiefs – as either vote brokers or development brokers – offer starkly different answers to this question. If chiefs are vote brokers, they are predicted to harm local development efforts. In this view, chiefs can use their material and nonmaterial power over other community members to direct them to support their preferred candidates. As a result, politicians do not need to provide development projects that benefit large numbers of voters to win votes; they can simply woo the chief. The possibility of mobilizing votes via chiefs depresses politicians' incentives to respond to their constituents. In contrast, if chiefs are first and foremost development brokers, then they should aid local development efforts. They provide the technology politicians need to effectively translate government resources into successful local projects. The possibility of coproducing development projects with traditional chiefs should improve development outcomes.

This chapter tests whether traditional chiefs help or harm the Zambian government's efforts to deliver projects and programming in rural areas. Drawing on case studies and interviews with politicians and chiefs, it demonstrates both that chiefs facilitate the delivery of many local public goods through collective action and that they are uniquely well positioned to do this. Then it draws on a natural experiment – the fact that many chiefdoms are temporarily without traditional leadership following the deaths of their chiefs – to demonstrate that communities with installed chiefs receive more local public goods and that this is so in part because they have higher levels of community contributions to these projects.

The Process of Providing Local Public Goods

An episode from my field research powerfully demonstrates Zambians' views of the role of chiefs in the development process. On a Sunday in July 2007, a delegation of chiefs from around Zambia arrived at a remote village in rural Lufwanyama District, more than 125 kilometers off the main highway. Their purpose was to oversee a meeting to select the next chief of Shibuchinga. For the previous decade, there had been no acting chief in the area, a vacancy caused by the fact that the eligibility of the successor appointed by the late chief had been challenged in court by another member of the family.