Vasudha Chhotray

The 'Anti-politics machine' in India: Depoliticisation through local institution building for participatory watershed development

Abstract This article investigates the rationale and implications of creating non-elected community-based bodies for Indias national watershed development programme in 1994. A discourse of depoliticisation is in use to justify the creation of ‘apolitical’ watershed committees in contrast to ‘political’ panchayats, ostensibly unsuitable for participatory development for their embodiment of political contestation and vested interests. The discourse masks conflicts between key actors in Indias development process and is highly malleable, acquiring pertinent meanings in specific contexts. Case-study evidence from two project villages in a south Indian district shows that the attempt to depoliticise this programme of panchayat politics fails, but sets up the ground for depoliticisation of another sort, by distancing watershed project spaces from pro-poor progressive politics.

Understanding the co-existence of conflict and cooperation: Transboundary ecosystem management in the Virunga Massif

This article contributes to our understanding of transboundary environmental management regimes through the application of an analytical framework that facilitates an exploration of the co-existence of conflict and cooperation. Rather than framing conflict and cooperation as mutually exclusive states at opposite ends of a spectrum, we seek to understand the ways in which cooperation can exist at the same time as conflict. We apply this framework to a study of conservation management in a transboundary area at the intersection of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Uganda. We identify two actual and one hypothetical phase of conflict–cooperation relations, in a landscape notorious for some of the worst violence of the last two decades. We map the evolution of phases of transboundary protected area management against the evolving security context, and we find that this approach has greater explanatory power than previous approaches that polarize conflict and cooperation. In particular, it helps us to understand the drivers of environmental cooperation, including the evolving characteristics of that cooperation. This new way of understanding the relationship between environmental management and security also enables us to reconsider the potential for environmental management to be instrumental in working towards interstate security objectives, for example through peace parks. We don’t find that the ‘low politics’ of environmental management should be seen as a predictable and manageable determinant of international relations. But an understanding of the coexistence of conflict and cooperation does also point to a more complex, non-linear relationship between low and high politics.

Hydrological modelling of water allocation, ecosystem services and poverty alleviation in the Pongola floodplain, South Africa

The Pongola River Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation (PRESPA) project quantified the economic benefits accuring to different livelihood sectors from the water resources of the Pongola floodplain, South Africa. The floodplain carries a diverse economy and ecology which is supported by flood events that once occured naturally but are now regulated by an upstream dam. PRESPA modelled the eco-hydrology which underpins various ecosystem services to determine how this might be managed to alleviate poverty. A model was used to quantify the economic value of the available water, especially the value accruing to the poor. This model linked to three development scenarios to explore trade-offs and outcomes of (1) a status quo, ‘unstructured’ economy; (2) a structured diverse economy; and (3) a structured ‘single sector’ agricultural economy. This model gives decision makers a measure of where water is best used in terms of poverty alleviation and enables them to examine future economic and ecosystem trajectories. In summary, poor households on the floodplain currently have a diversity of income and food sources, making them less vulnerable to economic and climatic shocks, while there is a trend towards intensive agriculture which may deliver higher returns but with greater costs and increased vulnerability.

Who cares about participation? How a rhetorical state policy is practised incredulously

Abstract This article responds to a recently made proposition that development policy does not drive practice but, instead, that practice produces policy, with key actors striving to maintain coherent representations of it. This proposition is used to examine the translation of the national policy for participatory Watershed Development in India into concrete procedures at the district level and, ultimately, the practices that follow to sustain them. While uncovering a definite chain of ‘upward’ representations in the relationship between practice and policy, this article discovers a striking disjuncture in the stakes of those who formulate the policy and all those who implement it, even in upholding a formal commitment to participation as the new authorised policy. This article demonstrates how participation actually works as a rhetorical state strategy in the face of widespread incredulity, with seriously impairing effects for equity as a policy objective.

Governance and the New Institutional Economics

New Institutionalist Economics (NIE) offers a seminal contribution to the wider debate on governance. NIE arose as the result of a growing interest among rational choice theorists in explanations for the emergence and change of institutions, specifically the link between individual agency and structural transformation. It presented a theory of institutions in order to extend neoclassical economics, which presumed that a complete set of smoothly functioning markets exists but did not refer to institutions to explain their existence and working. New institutionalism was a reaction against the ‘hyper-individualism’ of classical economic theory. Its principal offering is that institutions are the rules of the game in society, or more formally, are the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction. Among its principal architects, Douglass North (1990) emphasised that institutions reduce uncertainty in human exchange, which arises in the first place because human beings have incomplete information and limited mental capacity by which to process information. Institutions help to manage the demands and costs transacting.

Nullification of citizenship: negotiating authority without identity documents in coastal Odisha, India

This paper discusses the case of a community of Bengali immigrant settlers along the coast of Odisha in India at the centre of a unique citizenship controversy. Families have arrived here gradually over the years since 1947, and have generally acquired a range of identity documents from Indian state agencies. These documents certify to a range of rights that signal social and political participation within India: land ownership, voting rights and the receipt of official welfare subsidies. With little warning, a 2005 order by the state government following a high court directive led to the production of a list of 1551 persons, declaring such persons as ‘infiltrators’. The list ostensibly comprises those who have entered India illegally after 1971 or born to parents who entered illegally. While no deportation, as originally intended, has taken place, the nullification of their various documents of citizenship has created a void in their lives. This paper examines the wider politics of the case, especially focusing on how those with nullified documents negotiate the authority of the local state and actors within their own society, and what this reveals about the ever contested nature of citizenship in post-partition India.

Certifications of citizenship: the history, politics and materiality of identity documents in South Asian states and diasporas

Experiences in the post-partition Indian subcontinent refute the conventional expectation that the ‘possession of citizenship enables the acquisition of documents certifying it’ [Jayal 2013. Citizenship and Its Discontents: An Indian History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 71]. Instead, identity papers of various types play a vital part in certifying and authenticating claims to citizenship. This is particularly important in a context where the history of state formation, continuous migration flows and the rise of right-wing majoritarian politics has created an uncertain situation for individuals deemed to be on the ‘margins’ of the state. The papers that constitute this special issue bring together a range of disciplinary perspectives in order to investigate the history, politics and materiality of identity documents, and to dismantle citizenship as an absolute and fixed notion, seeking instead to theorise the very mutable ‘hierarchies’ and ‘degrees’ of citizenship. Collectively they offer a valuable lens onto how migrants, refugees and socio-economically marginal individuals negotiate their relationship with the state, both within South Asia and in South Asian diaspora communities. This introduction examines the wider context of the complex intersections between state-issued identity documents and the nature of citizenship and draws out cross-cutting themes across the papers in this collection.

Introduction: Exploring Governance

Twenty years ago nobody would have written this book. Governance has moved in the last two decades from the status of a lost word of the English language to a fashionable and challenging concept in a range of disciplines and research programmes. But after two decades of publication and debate it seems appropriate to ask: has it been worth it? We must quickly add, lest the reader throws the book down immediately, fearing they are about to waste their time, that our answer is a definite and clear affirmative: governance theory offers a valuable and challenging dimension to our understanding of our contemporary social, economic, and political world. The substantive chapters that follow will give able support to demonstrate the truth of that statement.

Governance and International Relations

This chapter examines the literature from International Relations (IR) in terms of its treatment of governance. There is an enormous variety of literature that takes a range of different theoretical and epistemological positions but shares in common a sense that globalisation is the driving force behind the growing interest in governance. It is the destabilising effects of globalisation that has created the governance response that is observed. The chapter opens with a review of the range of broad approaches to governance in the literature, all of which challenge the idea, previously dominant in IR and strongly associated with a realist position, that it is the battling and contesting interests of nation states that provide the only powerful dynamic of international politics.

Governance in Public Administration and Political Science

The emergence of governance theory from the early 1990s onwards has been one of the core developments in public administration and more broadly, for that part of political science orientated towards the study of policy-making. By 1999 George Fredrickson was able to make the bold claim that: Public administration is steadily moving … toward theories of cooperation, networking, governance, and institution building and maintenance. Public administration, both in practice and in theory, is repositioning itself to deal with the daunting problems associated with the disarticulation of the state. In short, a repositioned public administration is the political science of making the fragmented and disarticulated state work (Fredrickson, 1999:702). Not all governance scholars from public administration, let alone political science, would be willing to accept the idea that their goal was, or should be, to make a disjointed state work, as Fredrickson suggests, but most would go along with the claim that new thinking about governance has been introduced into the discipline because of shifts in the context for governing. The way of thinking about public administration and politics has changed in recognition of the changed conditions and practices of governing.