| Review of: | Seeing the State: Governance and Governmentality in India by Stuart Corbridge, Glyn Williams, Manoj Srivastava, Réne Véron |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Anil Varughese |
| Reviewed in: | Governance |
| Date accepted online: | 02/11/2007 |
| Published in print: | Volume 20, Issue 2, Pages 359-371 |
Book Reviews: Societal Welfare and Welfare States Worldwide
On the subject of governance in contemporary India, there are two familiar accounts. One is mostly laudatory, calling attention to steady achievements in reducing levels of poverty and improving human development, supposedly as a result of new, responsive, accountable, and empowering systems of governance. The other is largely pessimistic, pointing to the hollowness of governance reform in a socioeconomic context that sustains entrenched structural barriers, in turn preventing large sections of the population, especially the poor, from accessing the state.
One of the central tasks of the book is to understand how poor people make sense of the everyday state, how the poor "see the state" in their interactions with local institutions and processes. To answer this question, the authors explore how two new institutions of governance-the Employment Assurance Scheme (EAS) and Village Education Committees (VECs)-have shaped encounters between the poor and the state in five field sites covering three states: Bihar, Jharkhand, and West Bengal.
Drawing on rich empirical data, they demonstrate how poor peoples' sighting of the state is shaped by a series of engagements with the local political society (lower level officials, political fixers, political parties, and politicians), past knowledge of state engagement, dominant discourses of development, and existing patterns of socio-political exclusion. This complex set of factors lead to hybrid, uneven, episodic, and mediated sightings of the state by the poor. Often, the poor view the state not as a collection of institutions which share some unity of purpose but as fractious and discontinuous and not necessarily interconnected as a set of schemes and actors. Still, the new public administration has, albeit unevenly, reworked the terms of state-poor interaction and has expanded the sites of such interaction. Some of the new reforms have allowed better flows of information, the cultivation of new civic skills, and consequently more direct and even encounters with the state. These encounters offer the potential for making the state more participatory, efficient, accountable, and responsive to the poor.
The authors also respond to a set of key debates on participation, good governance, accountability, and decentralization in the four empirical chapters of the book. While they concur with some of the major criticisms against agendas of good governance, such as unrealistic assumptions of rule-bound behavior and self-regulating civil society, technocratic bias, neglect of structural inequality, and depoliticizing outcomes, they nonetheless believe that the new technologies of rule have widened the political playing field in favor of the poor. The book engages in detail the works of James Scott, James Ferguson, and Partha Chatterjee but does not share their overriding pessimism. The authors assert that the shifting technologies of governance and state-poor encounters in contemporary India cannot be reduced to a unitary discourse of development, nor can they be pronounced inconsequential or destined to fail, positions held by the post-developmentalists and post-colonialists.
This is an important book for its against-the-grain insights, which describe the nuanced ways in which local political societies, often built on a set of patron-client relations, nonetheless offer the possibilities of making the state more accountable and responsive to the poor. It does so by asking us to shun the simple rejection of new governance reforms, as advanced by the post-developmentalists, or an unquestioned corroboration of it, as advocated by some international development institutions and consultancy companies.
A shortcoming of the book, at least from the perspective of a comparative political scientist, is the lack of theorization of the comparative insights offered by the cases. The authors describe
Despite these shortcomings, the study is a significant contribution on the dynamics of local developmental state in India and the book's lucid prose will appeal to academics and development practitioners alike. It is an important work for those who wish to make the new public administration more cognizant of local realities and incentive systems.