Theory, Policy, Practice

Development and Discontents in India

Suman Nath, Debraj Bhattacharya, Suman Nath, Debraj Bhattacharya

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032248547
• eBook ISBN: 9781000435917
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Economic Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores the meanings and perceptions of development and the dialectics of theory, policy and practice. It looks at how theory translates into policy, and the disconnections in its design and implementation in the Indian context.

The book focuses on the influence of capitalist globalisation, democratisation, decentralisation and neoliberal economic reforms on the development discourse in India and how these have challenged the traditional role of the 'state', the meaning of citizenship, and public participation. Through an analysis of case studies from various parts of the country, it bridges the gap between policy prescriptions and practices and unpacks the institutional, political and policy-led compulsions and incompatibilities which most often remain unreported. It also discusses the intersections between policymaking and the politics of class, caste and gender, and emphasises the role bureaucracy plays in institutional governance.

The volume includes articles from professionals ranging from academics, practitioners and activists. It will be of interest to scholars and researchers of public policy, development studies, South Asian politics, and economics as well as policy makers and practitioners in government and civil society.

Chapter 1
Institutional environment and organisational responses in changing decentralised governance systems in India

An ethnographic study

Suman Nath

DOI: 10.4324/9781003159940-1

Introduction

West Bengal, one of the 29 states in India, has seen the longest dominant party rule of the world by the democratically elected Communist Party of India (CPIM)–led Left Front (LF). Trinamool Congress (TMC) in 2011 put an end to the rule, reaffirmed it in 2016 but started losing its popular support with a distinctive rise of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the 2019 Parliamentary election. Clearly, LF had a hegemonic (in Gramsci’s sense) dominant party system that has been changed over time by TMC. There is a clear difference between the two forms of politics: the LF adopted what is termed as the “bhadralok model” (Ruud, 1999; Franda, 1971; Mallick, 1993), and for TMC it is the profile of a “lumpen” or “subalternised” party – indicating its close link with the “subaltern” and lower-caste groups (Chandra, 2017; Samaddar, 2016). However, even in 2006 the “bhadralok” LF had a strong support base among the lower castes, tribes and also the Muslims. Scholars like Dasandi and Esteve (2017), Iyer and Mani (2012), Jourde (2008) and Turner and Hulme (1997) show that there is a possibility of a policy paralysis with the end of a dominant party system. It happens because in a dominant party system bureaucracy increasingly attaches itself to the regime. During regime change a series of power uncertainty, a crippling chain of command and role confusion arise. Mitra (2010) shows how, anticipating a political change in 2011 Assembly, several key bureaucrats sought transfer from their positions and often from the state as well. The LF allowed a political “deep probe” into the administration, which resulted in the percolation of party politics into the administration. They allowed the bureaucrats into administration and supervision. They were not the decision makers. The decision making and implementation were left for the party (Svara, 1994; Fredrickson, Smith, Larimer and Licari, 2014; Rakshit, 2011). Consequently, even though some of the important bureaucrats sought transfer and left the state or their positions, TMC inherited large sections of bureaucrats who had developed working under a distinct political culture, and a considerably large portion were involved within the hegemonic structure of the LF. While work on the bureaucracy–politics interface is rather limited, Rakshit (2011) and Nath (2018b) show that TMC has been able to make people and administration relatively free of the iron-fist of the party. Ray (2020), drawing on such research, posits two propositions to explain how TMC could avoid such policy paralysis and actually managed a considerable improvement to the public service delivery. The West Bengal Public Services Act that fixed up the timeline for the delivery of several public services indicates the effectiveness of such a delivery mechanism (GoWB, 2013). Ray (2020) argues that West Bengal is an exception because (a) “the nature of the mandate against the erstwhile dominant party … triggered by mass unrest,” hence the bureaucracy had no choice but to look at policy implementation and (b) because of TMC’s weak party institution it could not afford to disrupt the existing bureaucratic stability. While existing literature shows that the dominant party system seeps into bureaucracy, I have studied the structural and interactional mechanisms of such seepage to show (a) in what ways similar institutional environment affects different decentralised institutions differently and why and (b) what happens to the institutional environment and how do different organisations respond to it at the time of political transition. I have concentrated on two sectors of governance: (a) the Gram Panchayat (GP), the strictly public sector; and (b) agro-cooperatives, the quasi-public sector registered under the Societies Registration Act of the state. Before going to the ethnographic details of the governance institutions, I will focus on the theoretical perspectives related to institutions and organisations to situate the present work.

Theorising the present perspective

Institutions, organisations and their interface have a vast history of being studied by scholars from Economics, Political Science and Sociology. Each of them theorises over the debates of the structure-agency dilemma. Consideration of institutions as a structuring mechanism for early institutionalists is debated with neo-classical economics, which justifies pragmatic models with more agency orientation (Jaccoby, 1990). For Political Science much emphasis is on structural models as they explored formal political institutions or charters, legal codes and administrative rules during the nineteenth century (Eckstein, 1963). An expected alternative is the behaviouralist approach, which looks at the informal distribution of power both outside and inside the government institutions that influences the attitudes and political behaviour of the stakeholders (Thelen and Steinmo, 1992). Traditional sociologists like Spencer (1910), Sumner (1906) and Durkheim (1893) begin with an organic analogy to explain institutions as organ systems comprised of subsystems and analyse the mechanisms that maintain equilibrium. It soon became broad and included a set of organising principles (mores, folkways, laws, etc.) to perform particular functions. While Marx (1844/1972) focused on economic structural parameters, he also embraced the fact that these are products of human ideas and activities that gave early expression to the social constructions of reality. Weber’s work on bureaucracy (1946, 1947) and then the Parsonian view on “Cultural-institutional” (Parsons, 1960) have dominated the idea of institutions as a socio-cultural mechanism until the 1970s. Later on the neo-institutional theories in Economics stressed neo-classical economics. It theorised institutions from transaction cost perspective (Coase, 1937). Organisation structures as they explain is responses to the functional requirement of the institutional choice (Williamson, 1994, 2005). In Political Science, neo-institutional theories put significant emphasis on social arrangements and structures as creating a template of the institutional environment, ultimately shaping the organisations containing both formal and informal rules and procedures (Thelen and Steinmo, 1992; Evans, Rueschemeyer and Skocpol, 1985). The social constructionist position is quite apt here as Krasner (1988, p. 72) argues “capabilities and preferences … the very nature of the actors, cannot be understood except as part of some larger institutional framework.” The analysis therefore is a complex one that involves historical analysis, institutional building processes and path dependency (Ertman, 1997; Karl, 1997). Practical, everyday questions on the ways in which organisations run have also been explained through the rational choice theory (Pierson, 2004; Peters, 1999). Sociological enquiries with neo-institutional theories look at the cognitive aspect of human organisms as information processors (Markus and Zajonc, 1985). The Durkheimian idea of humans being influenced by social and cultural forms dominates a significant part of sociological enquiry through Mead, Parsons and Bourdieu till present times (Bergeses, 2004). Cultural anthropology plays an important conceptual as well as methodological role in so far as institutions are seen as crystallisation of culture and that humans have infinite possibilities even within institutions (Ridley, 2003). The debate of individual free agency and structural–cultural constraints are far from being resolved, but enquiries through phenomenology and ethnomethodology on cultural-cognitive dimensions of institutions put emphasis on externalisation of symbolic structures stemmed through institutions, objectification of constructs and finally internalisation of objectified constructs including institutional environment (Berger and Luckmann, 1967; DiMaggio and Powell, 1991). Such an idea of institutional environment consisting of cultural predispositions including rituals, codified bodies of knowledge and cultural artefacts (Wuthnow, 1987) has resulted in a generation of scholars enquiring the ways in which cultural items are produced, distributed, selected and institutionalised (Becker, 1982; Caves, 2000; Lampel, Shamsie and Lant, 2006). With this “cultural turn” scholars like DiMaggio and Powell (1991) emphasise on cognitive and not the evaluative-normative, components of behaviour, thereby questioning neo-classical economic model of rational decision making. Instead they emphasised on the tacit, routine nature of “choice” in organisational settings. To put things in perspective it is worth defining institutions after Scott (2008, p. 48): institutions “are comprised of regulative, normative and cultural cognitive elements that, together with associated activities and resources, provide stability and meaning to social life.”

Evidently, with such complexity of ideas and scholarly works on nature, methodology and functioning of institutions there is increasing recognition of institutional environments as part of a given culture and society that shapes much of the nature of organisations. The need for a comprehensive understanding of the culture as a powerful organising principle has been recognised by institutions like World Bank and World Trade Organisation (Sridhar, 2008a, b). It is necessary to look at institutions as parts of culture and not as an isolated enterprise. Such a view requires ethnographic engagements. Taking the cue of the scholarly works it is important to unearth the institutional components through the normative and regulative frameworks, and their internalisation as part of cultural-cognitive domain of the people to explore how incompatibilities emerge between rural governance organisations, how do they function and in what ways institutional environment influences their mode of operation (Scott, 2008). Gellner and Hirsch (2001) show that access to organisations, gaining consent and mediating the insider/outsider relationship are most prominent in doing ethnographic research in organisations. Taking Bate (1997) and Gellner and Hirsch (2001) as benchmark ethnographic works in organisations requires (a) participation, (b) multivocality and (c) a focus on people’s everyday working and how it differs from the prescribed rules.

West Bengal represents an interesting case. With its 34-year-long CPIM-led LF regime, it is expected that different organisations have developed a dependence on the regime itself. A particular nature of the institutional environment was nurtured during the earlier regime. It was an environment which shaped much of the informal norms and regulations that were internalised by the functionaries of administrations. Perhaps the strongest influence of the regime was on the three-tier Panchayat system. As Bhattacharyya (1998) notes through his study of CPIM party documents, it was a plan of the regime to make the Panchayat function according to the ideals of the party. Through a number of field-based studies it is seen that such machinery was indeed successful in continuing the regime (Bardhan, Mitra, Mukherjee and Sarkar, 2009; Chatterjee, 2009; Dasgupta, 2009; Majumdar, 2009; Chakrabarti, Chattopadhyay and Nath, 2011). As an extension of such an institutional environment, the machinery has also percolated in the farming systems, most conspicuously through cold storage networks (Nath and Chakrabarti, 2011; Nath, 2017). However, relatively little is known regarding the organisational mechanisms of such control and how did it transform over the years of regime change. I have carried out ethnographic works on two kinds of organisations over the period of such political transformation.

The two sets of ethnographies

I have explored two different sectors of governance, viz. Panchayat and agro-cooperatives in West Bengal to make sense of the ways in which institutional environment actually influences the organisational outcome. The timeframe of my ethnographic study is from 2008 to 2018, a period which has seen the fall of the 34-year-long Left regime and a consecutive second term of the TMC. While in 2016 TMC gained a massive popular mandate to assume the Assembly for the second time, the 2018 Panchayat election and 2019 Parliamentary election have shown a definite rise of the BJP as a challenging opposition force of the state. This political background reflects the nature of the political instability of the state at the moment. Moreover, there appears to be a definite inclination of the governance mechanism from the earlier party-based public transaction (as explored by Chatterjee, 2004; Bhattacharyya, 2009, 2016; Nath, 2018b) to identity-based mass mobilisation (Nath, 2018b, 2019a,b). In this section I will first reflect on the nature of the institutional environment framed by the local and state political dynamics and then will explore in what ways it affects the service delivery through these institutions at local and micro levels.

My first sets of ethnographies are done in the GP – the lowest of the three-tier governance system in India. I concentrate on two adjacent GPs under Khatra Panchayat Samiti (block) of Bankura Zilla Parishad (district). In the second set I concentrate on two agro-cooperatives working in connection with a couple of cold storages falling under the Baghnapara region of Purba Bardhaman district.

The political clout

Each of the two fieldwork sites has been undergoing a continuous political transformation since 2009, and electoral evidence...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Institutional environment and organisational responses in changing decentralised governance systems in India: An ethnographic study
• 2 The Community Development Block and India’s development discourse
• 3 Urban restructuring, forced evictions and transition of the welfare city into entrepreneurial city: The case study of Bawana resettlement colony, Delhi
• 4 Mapping the development paradigm of Northeast India from ancient past to present in the realm of political history and economy
• 5 A Multisited ethnography of land management in the context of the development policy in West Bengal
• 6 Revisiting Wittfogel: “Hydraulic society” in colonial India and its post-colonial legacies in hydropower management
• 7 Re-contextualising microcredit: From reinventing development to the financialisation of everyday life
• 8 The making of a neglected tropical disease: Discourse on snakebite and its medical management in India
• 9 Negotiation by the waste pickers: In the context of socioeconomic and cultural marginalisation
• 10 Dominant party rule, development and the rise of Hindu nationalism in West Bengal
• 11 Harnessing the digital revolution for development: The Indian experience
• 12 Organisation structure of family-owned and controlled business groups in India: Some reflections on theories and policies of corporate governance
• Appendix
• Index