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Ever since participation entered mainstream development discourse, critics have attacked it as form of political control. If development is indeed an 'anti-politics machine' (Ferguson, 1994), the claim is that participation provides a remarkably efficient means of greasing its wheels. But do participatory practices and discourse necessarily represent the de-politicisation of development? This pape

This article examines how more democratic forms of state-citizen engagement can be engineered under less than favorable political conditions, through the case of the Village Development Committees under the Left Front government in West Bengal, India. Our research shows that these Committees embodied empowered participatory governance ideals and made meaningful contributions to citizens' participa

This article examines the operation of Kudumbashree, the Poverty Eradication Mission for the Indian State of Kerala. Kudumbashree operates through female-only Neighbourhood Groups, which aim to contribute to their participants' economic uplift, and to integrate them with the activities and institutions of local governance. As such, Kudumbashree echoes poverty alleviation programmes elsewhere in th

This paper presents a relational approach to the study of poverty (. Mosse, 2010), and uses this to critically evaluate state strategies for identifying and alleviating poverty in Kerala, India. It traces these from national planning documents through to their point of implementation, drawing on qualitative research in two of Kerala's poorest Districts. Ideas of participatory poverty classificatio

This paper looks at the role of gender in the shaping and exercise of political authority. Its empirical focus is a slum in central Trivandrum, Kerala's capital city, which is undergoing a phased process of formalisation and rebuilding funded through a flagship Indian national programme, the JNNURM. The upgrade project should offer a dense network of ‘invited’ spaces for female participation withi

One of the benefits often claimed for 'moving' the state closer to people through the institutional reforms of democratic decentralisation is an improvement in the inclusion of politically marginalised groups. Decentralisation promises to deliver both the closer physical presence of centres of government and the formalisation of practices of representation at the grassroots. These changes in turn

This paper investigates governance reform which aims to 'move the state' closer to people, arguing that greater attention needs to be paid to two questions: how does political decentralisation affect the ways in which authority is exercised? And what spaces does it leave open for poor people's agency? It focuses on West Bengal, an Indian innovator of decentralisation through panchayati raj ('rule

This paper examines how India’s national urban development agenda is reshaping relationships between national, State and city-level governments. Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, the flagship programme that heralded a new era of urban investment in India, contained a range of key governance aspirations: linking the analysis of urban poverty to city-level planning, developing holisti

Expanded state-subsidised housing programmes in middle-income countries raise questions about the displacement and socio-spatial marginalisation of poor households. Examining these questions through people’s experiences of resettlement indicates the importance of mobility to their lives. Drawing on a mixed-method comparative study of Ahmedabad, Chennai and Johannesburg, we ask: How does the reloca

This paper looks at two governance challenges that sit behind global commitments to deliver ‘cities without slums’: under what conditions can participatory ideals be successfully transferred to housing redevelopment programmes, and under what conditions can participatory slum redevelopment trigger wider shifts towards inclusive urban governance? It does so by examining Indian national slum redevel

The growing emphasis on affordable housing and the sharp increase in its supply in Indian cities over the past two decades is characterised by two features that diminish the inclusive and integrative role of affordable urban housing. The first is the move toward constructing new housing stock rather than upgrading existing stock. Second, most of this new housing, increasingly in the form of multi-

This paper addresses an important, but under-studied, pathway for knowledge production in the field of urban planning: the practitioner engaging with academia through the writing of a PhD. Drawing on our own experiences of doctoral mentoring, in dialogue with PhD candidates, we reflect on the questions and challenges this form of knowledge production raises. The paper aims to extend planning theor

Large-scale inter-city infrastructure projects are proliferating across the Global South as industrial policy-makers have used spatial planning to purposefully transform regions’ economic and urban geographies. The Make in India policy and its promotion of industrial development corridors is emblematic of these trends, and this paper explores the relationship between this emergent national spatial

Long-standing questions about the production and control of knowledge about 'the developing world' have been given new urgency through the deployment of impact-evaluation practices within UK universities, highlighting the need for careful ethical reflection on the role of Northern researchers in both academia and practice. In this context, this article takes up the three underlying themes of this

This article argues that despite the fact that “good governance” has acquired a very particular set of meanings within the international development community, this remains an inherently contested and political concept. It traces the emergence of a good governance agenda within international development—and particularly within the World Bank—and identifies the important shifts that have occurred i

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 coun

Archaeologists create vast amounts of specialized data, which are often difficult to access, maintain, and reuse, even for practitioners themselves. In this article, we explore the implication of professional practices of data production in fueling archaeonormativity—i.e., the naturalization of behaviors and structures in archaeology that strip it of affect and meaning and that deny human (and non