Marie-Hélène Zérah

Shedding Light on Social and Economic Changes in Small Towns Through the Prism of Local Governance: A Case Study of Haryana

This chapter deals with local governance in small towns. A first objective is expand the existing work on the role and functions of the elected representatives and their relationship with higher levels of government and the bureaucracy. I argue that one main lessons to be drawn is the position (in their practices and in their perceptions) of councillors who are at times part of the state and at other times outside the state. Secondly, though a number of studies have looked at the profile of councillors, they have focused on their individual characteristics, or at best on the family unit, in the case of women. In this research, elected representatives are examined as members of various family, caste and professional networks that shape their “positional space”. By mapping their social surface, I try to understand further where their power is located in formal and informal structures of governance. Thirdly, I argue that despite being a weak locus of power, the comparative study of urban local bodies constitutes, in itself, a research site that opens up the complex stakes that are played out in small towns on particular issues, specifically the reconfiguration of power relations and economic shifts that are partly the result of their urbanisation process.

Purdah and Politics: Women’s Participation in Local Governance

This chapter explores the results of fieldwork conducted on municipal governance in tier-3 towns in the NCR-Haryana area. In an effort to gauge the nature of democratic decentralised governance in emerging urban areas, field-based knowledge points to avenues of effective participation for elected women representatives. Founded on gender-based affirmative action policies to increase the political participation of women, the 74th CAA delivers mechanisms to balance gender injustice and the non-participation of women in political decision-making. Tracing the social, cultural, economic, political and religious capital in select female representatives, this chapter illustrates the requisite forms of capital that allow effective participation versus a proxy status. To nuance the understanding of ‘effective participation’, the tasks of a political seat must be deconstructed and viewed from the perspective of the socially accepted actions that women can pursue, without facing barriers. This deconstruction makes it easier to understand what women can actually accomplish, which tasks they are less involved in, the dynamics of sharing these tasks with male relatives, and hence, the ways and means of augmenting their participation.

Introduction: Reclaiming Small Towns

The introduction to this edited volume seeks to decenter and enlarge our conception of urbanisation, shifting the perspective from large agglomerations to smaller urban settlements in the specific case of India, and to discuss the main results produced by the collective research team that participated in the Subaltern Urbanization Research project. This chapter defines the notion of subaltern urbanisation and argues in favour of reclaiming research on small towns. The recent increase in interest in urban studies in the global south, and particularly in South Asia, around the dynamics of urban change mainly concerns the large agglomerations, which are perceived as the main sites of economic development and social and demographic changes. This research project and the resulting edited volume positions itself vis-a-vis a vision of planetary urbanisation reduced to metropolitanisation and competition between global cities. It aims at challenging the usual approach which tends to consider the urban world only through the prism of very large cities. It defends a methodology based on the articulation of scales and the need to develop a multidisciplinary dialogue between large-scale analysis of urbanisation and in-depth scrutiny of localised cases. The introduction presents the main results relating to the understanding of the expanding world of ordinary towns: their spatial distribution and their dynamics (demographic and economic) (part I), their socio-economic embeddedness, in particular the entrenched as well as fluid linkages between land, society and people (part II), the type of public policies and governance that characterise these small towns and their impact on the quality of life (part III) and the manner in which innovation, production and circulation of people actually shape their economic trajectories (part IV).

Water Regimes Questioned from the ‘Global South’ : Agents, Practices And Knowledge

This working paper presents the proceedings of an international workshop on water policies, held on January 2016 in (Delhi) and brought together 25 participants. It was supported by a number of partners (Centre for Policy Research, Centre de Sciences Humaines, Institut Francais of Pondicherry, UMI i-GLOBES CNRS/University of Arizona, ANR ENGIND, ANR BLUEGRASS, Indo French Water Network et Institut de recherche pour le Developpement). The research focused on comparisons between different case studies in a range of countries (USA, Kenya, South Africa, Morocco, Mexico, France and India), adopting an approach situated at the crossroads of geography and sociology. This international dimension proves particularly appropriate for a study of ‘water regimes’ as is consubstantial to their development: beyond the models often identified as “national’, from the 19th century onwards, we can identify rationales of transfer involving knowledge, expertise, skills and trained agents. From the beginning of the 20th century these models have to be included in the complexity of potential circulations: North-South transfers, as well as South-North and South-South transfers. The workshop covered the following topics: water regime transformations, situations where dominant doxa is challenged, the socio-historic transformations of the ‘Hydrocracies’ with emergence of a new generation of water professionals.

Politics and Governance in the Water Sector: The Case of Mumbai

The recently planned reforms in the city of Mumbai are emblematic of the ongoing changes in the water supply sector in urban India. Though these changes introduce commercial principles along with social engineering interventions to provide round-the-clock water, the water sector is mostly seen as a sector in need of an institutional fix. Proposals to reform Mumbai’s water supply typically support technological and financial mechanisms to find solutions to social and spatial equity issues. However, in situations where the service is provided via non-institutionalized arrangements, often mediated by the political arena, providing water becomes an object of political debate. In Mumbai, a city rife with political competition between parties with varying political ideologies, this situation leads to a contentious debate on the right to the city of many urban dwellers deprived of urban services. As such, Mumbai highlights the embedded nature of the question of water reform, urban politics, and rights.

POLÍTICAS AMBIENTAIS COMPARADAS ENTRE PAÍSES DO SUL: pressão antrópica em Áreas de Proteção Ambiental Urbanas*

This paper aims to compare the spatial policies and their actions towards the urban areas of environmental protection in two cities, Sao Paulo (Brazil) and Mumbai (India), taking as an organizing element the presence of urban forests in the form of protected conservation areas (Category II , IUCN).Sartori (1981) highlighting similarities and differences is a simple, effective and interesting method to comparative public policies, emphasizing that these elements may be part of local discourse. With this emphasis, we attempt to analyze the Sanjay Gandhi National Park and Cantareira State Park and highlight the factors chosen for comparison: the conversion of forest to urban conservation areas and territorial cons icts between environmental and urban uses. We conclude the article with the analysis of policy strategies.