To shame or not to shame—that is the sanitation question

The Community‐Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) programme aims to end open defecation through facilitating activities that evoke a sense of shame, shock and disgust. The programme's initial success and low‐cost design has seen it become hegemonic in donor‐supported rural sanitation. However, the theoretical basis of the use of shame has not been critically evaluated. Supporters claim that shame helps form and maintain social relationships, yet contemporary psychosocial literature highlights that it is a volatile and often harmful emotion, particularly in conditions of poverty. Using a case study of Cambodia, which rejected the coercive elements of shame in CLTS, we explore the problems of shame and limits of local ownership of development.     

Accounting for success and failure in policy implementation: The role of commitment in India's MGNREGA

Commitment or political will is often notable by its absence. While lack of commitment is a key factor in policy failure, it has been challenging to identify and operationalize how commitment can shape successful implementation. This article applies Brinkerhoff's (2000) framework of expressions of commitment to explain how commitment of policy elites shape policy implementation processes. Evidence for five characteristics of commitment traces these expressions from two types of policy elites — politicians and bureaucrats. Primary data from four Indian states were used—Chhatisgarh, Assam, Bihar and Andhra Pradesh—to examine the case of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Act (MGNREGA). The data were collected through interviews with state‐level elites, supplemented by secondary data on the political economy of these states. In explaining how successes and failures of the MGNREGA are attributable to the commitment of these actors, the article considers the politics of policy implementation. It argues that commitment is critical at the sub‐national level in India, and explains the different outcomes of MGNREGA in the four states. The article considers how to strengthen policy implementation, and demonstrates that this can be done through capitalizing on positive feedback loops between different strands of commitment, as well as between commitment of administrative elites and political party leaders. The paper concludes that commitment and capacity feed off each other, improving implementation of social policies.     

Dangers of Decentralisation in Urban Slums: A Comparative Study of Water Supply and Drainage Service Delivery in Kolkata,India

Clientelism may lead to the underprovision of services which are deemed suitable for decentralisation. Water distribution and drainage services, managed from a lower level of municipal authority, are liable to be affected by clientelism and consequent underprovision. Water quality, maintained from a higher municipal layer, is not likely to be affected by clientelism. Capture by politically influential and dominant social and religious groups is likely to take place for important services like water supply. The article suggests that awareness, measurability, importance and resource intensiveness of service are additional factors to be considered for assessing the suitability of a sector for decentralisation.     

From coherence to coheritization: explaining the rise of policy coherence in EU external policy

ABSTRACT

Over the past decade, the external policy of the European Commission has become increasingly entangled by the notion of policy coherence. Previously ‘siloed’ policy areas such as trade, agriculture, and development are increasingly approached as challenges only effectively resolved by addressing their positive and negative interlinkages. While the EC is critical of fundamental incoherencies between different policy areas, it simultaneously calls to harness synergies between them. To explain this ambiguous approach, we combine insights from speech act theory and cultural political economy. We aim for methodological triangulation by employing social network analysis, an explanatory narrative, and expert interviews. We argue that the Commission’s approach towards coherence can be understood as a process that reshapes the actor landscape around the discourse on coherence. By gradually pushing out the most outspoken actors, the Commission discursively resolves the inherent contradictions of reconciling free trade and development of the Global South.     

Making sense of the politics of sanitation in Cape Town

Abstract

The paper examines the history and politics of sanitation and urban belonging and citizenship in Cape Town. It traces the cultural histories of waste and odour in order to reveal the embedding of liberal citizenship, as well as technology, in the body. We do this to make sense of why and how toilets and waste have become recent objects and instruments of struggle in Cape Town, and elsewhere. The paper shows that these political struggles did not arise from nowhere; their emergence is the outcome of historically and materially sustained contradictions that are fundamental to liberal governance.     

Inequalities in the public sphere: emergence of community television in India

Economic restructuring in the 1980s opened the doors to the previously state-dominated television sector in developing countries. In India, unexpectedly, the resulting competitive setting produced multiple channels targeting various local ethnicities from below along with national-level expansion involving transnational corporations from above in a process now known as localization. While the plurality of channels translates into growth of the public sphere, this paper examines the reasons behind the uneven growth of community media, which cannot be explained by the community's size or economic resources. Some community channels extend their reach into the national arena while others lag in media development implying unequal political participation in the communicative system. What are the institutional reasons behind such variations in a multiethnic setting? The paper also examines whether the development of ethnic media reflects the redistribution of power taking place in the political arena or is it an independent development with implications of its own.     

New economic globalization,new industrial policy and late development in the 21st century: A critical analytical review

After having been put aside for three decades, industrial policy has reappeared in the research and policy debate on economic development in the Global South. However, it has also been argued that fragmented and decentralized value chains have foreclosed the traditional role of industrial policy. The article reviews three strands of thinking, exploring to what extent and how one can align the call for new industrial policy with the expansion of global value chains? It shows how the research agenda can be moved forward by realigning contributions from global value chain scholarship with researchers who take their point of departure concerning new industrial policy in structural transformation, technological capability and innovation system thinking.     

Framing the corporate responsibility-reputation linkage: The case of Tata Motors in India

This study, focusing on the emerging economy context of one of India's largest automotive companies, Tata Motors, analyzes the thematic framing of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate reputation. Five CSR frames are shown: institutionalization, community development, modernization, mainstreaming, and nation-building. Reputation is framed via: heritage, nationbuilding, technological advancement, global footprint, and responsibility. The findings suggest how firms may better align their CSR efforts with regular business, and their larger public relations campaigns with wider social perceptions of their responsibilities.     

Aesthetics of arrival: spectacle,capital, novelty in post-reform India

India’s celebrated ‘arrival on the global stage’ as a desirable ‘emerging market’ for global investors signals the spectacular moment that is said to have ruptured the barriers between the first and third worlds. If the notion of arrival anticipates the long-awaited acceleration in the pace of history, it also harnesses a euphoric India to the limitless future promised by the new. In this special issue, we set our focus on the aesthetics of arrival that signal novelty, visibility and celebration of post-reform India within and outside the nation. We ask how novelty is manufactured and experienced when the majority of the population remains excluded from new India. The answer probably lies in the way in which this other India is signified as the past, as ‘old India’ that holds back the nation. The novelty, we propose, is not only experienced in the promise of the future, but also in the aesthetic force of the promise to overcome a humiliating past, tainted by colonialism, in order to realise a truer and more timeless ‘new’ India     

Rethinking the policy influence of experts: From general characterizations to analysis of variation

This paper first surveys the four principal positions in the debate about the policy influence of professional experts — technocracy, extensive mandates, limited mandates, and servants of power — and finds none entirely satisfactory. While the limited mandates position is the best general characterization of the policy influence of experts, many instances reveal more extensive influence. The papers argues for shifting the discussion from general characterizations to the systematic analysis of variation in the extent and significance of professional influence. A framework for analyzing this variation is proposed. The framework highlights the importance of depoliticization, the framing of issues as narrowly technical or involving the protection of a central cultural value, political situations that encourage the informal capture of power by professional experts or the delegation of power to experts, and the differing level of legitimacy enjoyed by professional occupations, based on their centrality in social regulation.     

Domestic Violence in Rural India: Phenomenological Study from Cultural Perspective

Historically, women in India have been experiencing domestic violence in various forms throughout their lives, irrespective of caste, class, religion, and region. The objective of this study is to gain a deep and thorough understanding of the causes and concerns relating to domestic violence in rural Indian sociocultural context. It also tries to understand the type of support the female partners get while coping with intimate partner violence through phenomenological principles. The purposive sample consisted of 15 rural Indian women. The results showed four main themes: (1) causes of domestic violence, (2) impact on health, (3) support received, and (4) dilemma of abused women. During the study the women came up with various causes leading to domestic violence that affected their physical and mental health. They also narrated the limited support they received in terms of protection from their family and/or neighbors, highlighting their dilemma and helplessness in the rural Indian cultural context. This study also attempts to show some insights on what Hindu religion says about women.     

The Impacts of Supermarket Procurement on Farming Communities in India: Evidence from Rural Karnataka

The rapid expansion of supermarket retailing, with its impact on farmer communities, represents a contentious part of India's recent economic development. This article reports on three districts of Karnataka, where a survey of 78 farmers supplying fruits and vegetables to Reliance Fresh, a leading supermarket chain, reveals low levels of vertical co‐ordination, a lack of written contracts, and highly competitive environments, with the quality parameters used by supermarkets specifying only a limited set of conditions. These findings suggest that supermarket‐led restructuring in India has not yet reached a stable institutional situation.     

SGACA: The Rise and Paradoxical Demise of a Political‐Economy Instrument

This article discusses the Strategic Governance and Corruption Analysis (SGACA) introduced in 2007 by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a tool for political‐economy analysis of governance structures in aid‐receiving countries. It suggests an explanation of the paradox that SGACA was generally seen as a strong analytical instrument, yet was discarded within one 4‐year policy cycle. Drawing on the literature on policy innovations, it argues that there are three main causes of this demise: first, the collective‐action problems involved in getting innovations implemented in the apparatus of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; second, the fact that the policy window opened for SGACA by the mid‐2000s did not stay open throughout the implementation process; and third, the bureaucratic politics played out in the environment in which SGACA had been developed.     

The political economy of financial inclusion: tailoring donor policy to fit

Financial inclusion has recently become a globally acclaimed policy objective. This provokes the need to review policy in this sector, particularly in light of the tensions that arise between donor approaches founded on market modernism and governments with more activist leanings. This is done here in the context of efforts to move donor development policy beyond ‘best practice’ institutional blue‐prints to those which are ‘good enough’, which seek to understand underlying political economy dynamics in order to find space to engage with governments. In doing so, it is argued that there is scope for ‘working with the grain’ and harnessing the political economy of government policy in order to produce financial inclusion outcomes.     

Elite positionings towards Hindi: Language policies,political stances and language competence in India1

In India, Hindi is imagined and institutionalized as the national language which weds together India's pluralistic population under the banner of a shared Indian identity. Approaching language competence as embedded in and performed through language practices and ideologies, I explore how a New Delhi elite community positions themselves towards Hindi vis‐à‐vis national language policies and political movements. Contrasting with traditional unified elite portrayals, e.g. ‘elite closure’ ( Myers‐Scotton 1990 ), India has multiple sociolinguistically discordant elite groups, and these liberal elites ideologically construct their Hindi (in)competency in an alternative framework attending to the history (and failure) of Hindi‐based nationalism, their disalignment with modern right‐wing movements, and their continued affiliation with English. This perspective of some elites as negotiating and disagreeing with contemporary political movements and language policy legislature illuminates language competencies as socially constructed and locally grounded, and challenges past interpretations of postcolonial elites as unified actors controlling the dominant linguistic marketplace.     

Poultry and policy in Ghana: Lessons from the periphery of an agricultural policy system

We analyze poultry‐related policy documents from Ghana and ask how the problems identified and the actions proposed have changed over time. The analysis highlights the fact of limited and poor quality data, and associated uncertainty, ambiguity and poor specification of both problems and interventions. It also points to a long‐term commitment to intensive commercial production as the preferred pathway to deliver more animal protein. However, in the face of persistent feed constraints and economic liberalization, imports of frozen chicken have sky‐rocketed since the early 2000s, and a new pathway has come to dominate. We discuss this outcome and what it says more generally about policy around minor crops and livestock species.     

Sociology and political arithmetic: some principles of a new policy science

This paper advances the position that sociology needs to develop an approach to research which focuses on fundamental social problems. In doing so it shares many of the intellectual values and goals of political arithmetic while seeking to move methodologically beyond it. Since such problems are complex they will require, typically, interdisciplinary input and a concomitant approach to the development and appraisal of theories. We are not, therefore, advocating the primacy of sociology but arguing that it has a distinctive part to play in addressing the fundamental problems of the twenty-first century. However, a policy-oriented sociology has also to take up the task, so clearly defined by the tradition of political arithmetic, which is to hold governments to account. Consequently a central principle of a new policy science is that it should contribute to democratic debate about policy.     

Finance Capital and the Water Crisis: Insights from Mexico

This paper explores how finance capitalism materializes as socio-ecological process, shedding light on the complex causalities in which current shifts in control over natural resources are embedded. Housing is a critical aspect of financialization. A case study of the financialized housing sector in Central Mexico shows (i) how housing policy serves as a mechanism for the redistribution of wealth from the working class to global finance capital, and (ii) how mortgage-financed housing projects come into being only through an existing water governance regime, while in turn leading to new structures of groundwater governance with profound social and ecological implications. The paper concludes that current accumulation and natural resource regimes interact in complex and contradictory ways that go beyond straightforward resource grabbing. It suggests that Moore’s concept of ‘capitalism in the web of life’ could help to understand how finance capitalism simultaneously transforms the socio-natural world and is produced by it.