The creation and withdrawal of spaces for participatory governance: the case of village development committees in West Bengal, India

This article examines how more democratic forms of state-citizen engagement can be engineered under less than favorable political conditions. We look at a participatory reform enacted by the Communist-led Left Front government in West Bengal, India, the development of Village Development Committees. Our research shows that these Committees embodied empowered participatory governance ideals and made meaningful contributions to citizens’ participation within the local state, confirming the potential for well-designed institutions to deepen democratic engagement. However, this reform's abrupt reversal indicates that leftist parties are not uniform wholes, nor are they automatically wholehearted supporters of empowered participatory governance. As well as being driven forward by a committed core team, reform through the Committees also needed to be connected to a wider and more public set of claims about the Left Front's participatory successes, in order to build its legitimacy and face down resistance from local administrators and politicians. Our wider argument is that research should examine not only the quality of participatory spaces themselves, but also their political contexts, if we are to understand how experiments in empowered participatory governance can “scale up” and become durable.