Dasgupta, D. and Williams, G. (2023) The creation and withdrawal of spaces for participatory governance: the case of village development committees in West Bengal, India. Politics and Society, 51 (4). pp. 493-519. ISSN 0032-3292
Abstract
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.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2022 The Author(s). This is an author-produced version of a paper subsequently published in Politics and Society. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. Article available under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-ND licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). |
Keywords: | Empowered participatory governance; Participatory planning; West Bengal; Left Front |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Urban Studies & Planning (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 18 May 2022 10:18 |
Last Modified: | 10 Jul 2024 14:12 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | SAGE Publications |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1177/00323292221102133 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:186921 |
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