Stuart Corbridge

Participation and Power: Poor People's Engagement with India's Employment Assurance Scheme

‘Participation’ has become an essential part of good developmental practice for Southern governments, NGOs and international agencies alike. In this article we reflect critically on this shift by investigating how a ‘participatory’ development programme — Indias Employment Assurance Scheme (EAS) — intersects with poor peoples existing social networks. By placing the formalized process of participation in the EAS within the context of these varied and uneven village–level relationships, we raise a number of important issues for participatory development practice. We note the importance of local power brokers and the heterogeneity of ‘grassroots’ (dis)empowerment, and question ideas of power reversals used within the participatory development literature.

The geography of things that may become memories: the 2001 earthquake in Kachchh-Gujarat and the politics of rehabilitation in the prememorial era

Abstract This article explores the politics of reconstruction and the competing memorial practices that emerged after a devastating earthquake in western India during 2001. The material is drawn from extensive ethnographic research and analyses of the politics of rehabilitation in the “prememorial era,” the period before an official memorial is erected when the gap between the signified (the earthquake) and the signifier (the memorial) is still wide open and meanings and narratives of the disaster are being created, rehearsed, and contested. Many of the reconstruction initiatives undertaken after the disaster are inseparable from the politics of contemporary Hindu nationalism. Consequently, the main sections of the article examine the political nature of memorial practices and ideas about reconstruction in relation to expressions of nationalism and regionalism.

Re-framing Democracy and Agency in India: Politics of Middlemen and Political Society

Introduction Some of the most pressing debates in development studies have concerned the relative merits of states and markets, or the means by which markets might be regulated by a range of public institutions from the local to the global scale. These debates have taken shape, most famously, in the contrasting cases of sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia, and they have an obvious and continuing relevance in countries as diverse as Brazil, Nigeria, India and China. Yet if debate on these issues continues to be fierce, there appears to be general agreement that ‘strong states’ or ‘free markets’ need to be kept in check by vibrant civil societies. Indeed, it is a common proposition in development studies that this hazy zone of ‘freedom’ between the family and the state is a source of unparalleled strength for ordinary men and women, and a source of development itself and even economic growth. Robert Putman has made this claim as strongly as anyone. His suggestion that economic growth is promoted by a prior build-up of social capital – of peoples engagements with a dense network of civic associations – has become a staple of World Bank thinking since the mid-1990s. Even where the causal propositions of Putnam are refused, it is clear that the virtues of civil society are widely admired. Arturo Escobar looks to civil society as a breeding ground for oppositional movements and experiments. It functions for him, and perhaps also for Ashis Nandy in India, as a potential zone of resistance to the dehumanizing claims of developmentalism.

Seeing the State: Technologies of rule and the war on poverty

Introduction In his now-famous account of the making and unmaking of the Third World, Arturo Escobar argues not only that an era of developmentalism was inaugurated by President Truman in his Point Four speech of 29 January 1949, but also that the aid programmes which followed were justified by ‘the discovery of mass poverty’ in the less economically accomplished countries (Escobar 1995: 21). In making these claims Escobar directs us to the production of poverty as part of a wider (geo)political discourse, and this is a central theme of this chapter. The production of poverty as a failing, or as an incomplete set of capabilities, is linked to the production of persons who can be labelled as poor, and who can either be reproached for being the bearers of certain pathologies – the illiterate man who has to be educated, the overly fecund woman whose body has to be disciplined – and/or acclaimed as people who deserve the help of others. Whether or not members of rural society are unaware of their poverty before they are labelled as such by outsiders, as Lakshman Yapa maintains was the case for him, growing up in Sri Lanka, is something we consider later. But it is clearly the case that the production of poverty by various government and other agencies creates many of the spaces within which ‘poorer people’ are bound to see ‘the state’.

Gender and Green Governance: The Political Economy of Women's Presence Within and Beyond Community Forestry

macroeconomic variables and demonstrate quite clearly how their methodology improves upon earlier studies. Drawing on data for the 40 years from 1960 they suggest that gender inequalities in education and labour markets ‘considerably reduce economic growth’, particularly in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. As a collection this work has theoretical, methodological and empirical interest for undergraduate and graduate students of economics, as well as seasoned macroeconomists and scholars of development policy. Previously published as a special issue of Feminist Economics, each paper stands well on its own. As a book, it could have done with a more heavy-handed editor with a view to a wider readership. For example, a clearer explanation of the different methodologies would have been helpful. A concluding chapter which synthesised the most important insights of the papers would have been appreciated. The book, nevertheless, is a convincing example of the importance and relevance of feminist macroeconomics, and approaches to policy, which thoughtfully captures the significance of gender and its interaction with multiple forms of inequality.