Despite the nice geometrical properties of higher dimensional Chern-Simons
(CS) supergravity theories these actions suffer from one major drawback, na
mely, their connection with the real world. After some quick remarks on thr
ee-dimensional gravity, we consider five-dimensional CS supergravity and st
udy to what extend this theory reproduces the standard low energy descripti
on of gravitons and gauge fields. We point out that if one deforms the CS a
ction by changing the value of the cosmological constant by a small amount
(thus breaking the CS symmetry), propagation around AdS becomes non-trivial
, asymptotically Schwarzschild-AdS solutions exist, and the gauge field acq
uires its standard quadratic propagator.