Abstract
Public policy in India is in a state of flux. The nature of the policy process has changed dramatically with an increasing role of different actors, both locally and globally. A case is made to listen to the multiple voices that are emerging in governance processes; it is argued that it is necessary to create a space for dialogue among civil society and citizens (Lahiri-Dutt, 2008). The demand for stronger links between research and policy has grown, as much as efforts to mainstreaming public policy education to professionalize the bureaucracy.
Several trends at the global level have shaped policy-making at the level of nation-states, often creating claims of the erosion of state autonomy (Chang, 2006). New discourses have emerged that shape policy choices. Several discourses have been nevertheless reduced to the status of rhetoric and cliché. Emerging demographic trends at the national level—such as urbanization—and environmental trends at the global level—such as climate change—have redefined the contours of public policy and governance, posing new challenges for policy formulation as well as engendering debates on appropriate forms of governance.
Governance refers to all manners of exercising control and authority in the allocation of resources (World Bank, 1994). Governance issues are thus closely tied to the processes and mechanisms through which people access resources. These include issues of property rights, social relationships and gender, as well as social capital through which people access resources. Several approaches to governance reform have been experimented within the past; however, the extent to which they have improved the control of resource users remains a moot question. Often this has been a question of efforts at changing control relations between the state and civil society; while policies have succeeded in creating management capacity at lower levels, it has been more difficult to alter power and control relations.
The gap between ‘governance’ and ‘government’ is understood to have widened in the Indian context, as well as globally (Mathur, 2009). Actors other than the state have come to acquire a greater role in the exercise of control and authority in the allocation of resources. The locus of policy-making has moved from the state to other actors: markets and civil society have created greater space for themselves (Narain et al., 2014). State authority has been diluted by a greater influence of other actors, both at local and global levels. On the one hand, donors and funders have played an increasing role in influencing the direction and nature of reforms; on the other hand, several civil society organizations have made their presence felt in governance processes. International NGOs and transnational corporations have served to challenge the state authority.
New discourses such as those of neo-liberalism and good governance have altered the relationships between state, markets and civil society. While the discourse of neo-liberalism was founded on the narrative of the inefficient state, the neo-liberal paradigm evoked criticisms on account of the exclusion of the poor from the provision of service delivery (Urs and Whittel, 2009). The discourse on gender mainstreaming has gained more prominence, even though gap between rhetoric and practice has persisted (Ahmed, 2008; Joshi, 2014; Kulkarni, 2014). The discourse on good governance has created a demand for greater accountability and transparency, while creating more space for civic engagement and civil society participation.
During the 1980s and 1990s, a disenchantment with the role of the state as the main actor in governance processes created grounds for policies for decentralization. This process of involving users in public service delivery or in the management of public infrastructure through deliberate public policy intervention came to be carried out in several sectors. However, a number of factors were found to limit the effectiveness of the process, such as, the reproduction of unequal power relations in the internal working of local user groups, limited attention to questions of rights and entitlements, as well as resistance within the bureaucracy.
The academic augmentation of public policy in India is relatively new. In 1979, Myron Weiner, in an article titled ‘Social Science Research and Public Policy in India’, analyzed the roles and natures of different institutions working on policy issues, including IIMs. The article concludes, ‘Research in this field is in a preliminary phase. Studies remain scattered and generally unrelated to one another, lack a theoretical focus, and are not as yet cumulative.’ In the last decade, with the support of the Government of India, dedicated programmes in public policy and management have been introduced by institutes such as IIMs, Management Development Institute and several central universities. There are very few political scientists, sociologists or anthropologists focusing on public policies in India. Most of the policy analyses and debates are dominated by economists, and insights from other social sciences are relatively new. As a result, some critical aspects of policy studies are relatively well developed (such as measuring policy effects), but others, much less. The issues and questions, for instance, of why policies are formulated and designed in particular ways in the first place, and the political shaping of policies ‘on the ground’, do not receive much attention (Mooij and Vos, 2003).
The realization of the need to bridge the gap between practice and policy has finally begun taking shape in the government. This is evident from the recent internship programme in higher education, announced by the Ministry of Human Resource Development, which stresses on engaging Indian students in policy analysis. These initiatives show a shift from policy-analysis processes towards participatory decision-making. In a way, they also create a policy space for policy analysts other than positivists. The need for social perspectives on the public policy is an emergence of a new paradigm of governance and is a result of different forms of engagement with civil society, media, private sector and judicial activism.
Designing and implementing long-term sustainable change requires demonstration of the truth, which, sometimes, becomes a political risk for policy makers. Thus, impurity and its effects bring with them the need to investigate the past. Truth in policy-making is still caught up in the form of a struggle. Judgement no longer solely depends on the fulfilment of a procedure, but on the reality of a fact (Defert, 2011). Lack of consolidated insights and academic resources of the right set of actors on these policy issues have often treated symptoms rather than causes. This signifies that the reality of the fact must be established for one to escape the effects of the impurity.
In this backdrop, this issue of Vision–The Journal of Business Perspectives—examines the changing contours of public policy formulation and implementation in India. The aricles chosen in this issue cover a wide range of areas of public policy formation, while focusing on the specific trends and processes at the global and national levels that have shaped the evolution of public policy and engendered debates on new and appropriate forms of governance.
The following articles attempt to construct facts through the scientific enquiry of the existing literature and analyzing multiple discourses. The articles capture multi-dimensional public policy issues in India, with particular reference to fiscal decentralization of municipal corporation, governmentality of bureaucratic attitude, analysis of transitory urban spaces, adoptive governance in the context of climate change, disaster and development, education, food, livelihoods, gender, cities and the community radio as a development tool. These articles seek to identify ingredients associated with successful public policy, public action and programme implementation for problem-solving—be it issues of policy paralysis due to ineffective bureaucracy, lack of strategic engagement with think tanks or gender, education, food-and-nutrition insecurity, unsustainable rural livelihoods, mushrooming of unplanned cities and irreversible climate change.
Though India is divided by caste, religion and region, these divisions have persisted largely due to lack of structural and organized linkages between policy makers and academia. Consequently, the premise of policy-making has remained embedded in bureaucratic power structures. Thus, despite the right intention, policy decisions have remained inadequate due to incomplete knowledge of reality.
Out of the 12 articles, two articles (by Monica Singhania and Mayank Sharma) are structured around empirical understanding of the Municipal Corporation of New Delhi. The article by Poulomi Banerjee et al. focuses on measuring and mapping the transitory space in Hyderabad. Monica Singhania and Mayank Sharma, in ‘Trifurcation of MCD: First Budget as Essential Tool of Governance’, analyze the management tools of installation and innovative development of the budgetary system in the trifurcated Municipal Corporation of New Delhi as a prerequisite to good governance. From the people’s perspective, the budget plays a significant role in urban local bodies when it comes to meeting socio-political obligations. Poulomi Banerjee et al., in ‘Measuring and Mapping Transitory Spaces in India: A Case Study of Hyderabad City’, measure and map peri-urban areas with an assumption that they are a combination of both space and processes. The authors argue that it is a reflection of a complex mix of both spatial and ‘a-spatial’ phenomena that may be observed at the level of the household, village, sub-district or district. Understanding peri-urban as a ‘place’ helps identify features and processes that effectively correspond with ways that stand midway between completely rural and purely urban. However, as an ‘a-spatial’ phenomenon, it corresponds to processes wherein its location is not restricted to the fringe areas but can occur anywhere. The article constructs an analytic framework for identifying and measuring peri-urban areas based on their various dimensions.
The article by Rahul Singh et al. focuses on the role and relevance of voluntary think tanks on policy-making, while Sangeeta Goel’s article focuses on bureaucratic attitude. Both articles focus on government ability to engage and the public mentality to be distant regarding the participatory process of policy-making, ultimately affecting its performance. Rahul Singh et al., in ‘Think Tanks, Research Influence and Public Policy in India’, suggest that structured institutional think tanks in India are a relatively new phenomena in comparison to the West. In this backdrop, the article analyzes issues of definition and ideology, credibility in research, governance, funding and interaction on policy. Bureaucratic Attitudes—An Intermediary Variable of Policy Performance by Sangeeta Goel focuses on the psychological baggage or attitudes of human agency that might interfere with policy process at the implementation level, distorting the entire policy outcome. The article is based on ethnographic case-based analyses located in an Indian public organization.
The article by Meerambika Mahapatro traces the genealogy of gender discourse, while Jain and Bhardwaj focus on understanding diversity as a source or solution of exclusion. The article
Navarun Varma et al. focus on one of the most encompassing and topical issues of policy debate—climate change, disaster and development for adoptive governance; while Sumit Vij’s article captures the untamed urbanization, common property resources and gender relations. On the one hand, growing international attention to climate change has led to debates around new forms of (adaptive) governance; on the other hand, it has led to thinking on innovative ways of building community resilience and adaptive capacity. In particular, the concepts of vulnerability, capacity and resilience have been particularly strong and structuring within the disaster-risk-reduction literature where both the concepts of vulnerability and capacity emerged in the 1970s and 1980s (Gaillard, 2010). Since then, they have sustained discourses on sustainable development and climate change mitigation and adaptation. Addressing governance challenges in the face of climate change, the article by Navarun Varma et al. highlights the need for adaptive governance in the context of urban and rural flooding; the authors show how different narratives describing a problem create a situation wherein stakeholder perceptions of the situation fail to converge. The article by Sumit Vij explores the equity dimensions of the process, examining how urbanization processes shape the access of the poor and landless to common property resources on which they depend for their sustenance. Sumit Vij shows how urbanization dynamics interface with local power relations to further restrict the access of the poor to common property resources.
‘Democratizing Information in India: Role of Community Radios as a Developmental Intervention’ by Madhukar Shukla emphasizes the value of reinstating locally suited policy instruments for appropriate sustainable development. At the time when information access and utilization are critical agents of transformation, Shukla’s article analyzes social and spatial characteristics of the communities that are dispersed, and as their issues and needs are both unique and varied, community radios hold an enormous potential for promoting sustainable development by strengthening the grass-roots communities. It highlights the role of Community Radio Stations in promoting development by democratizing access to information. Patnaik and Prasad in ‘Revisiting Sustainable Livelihoods: Insights from Implementation Studies in India’, through state-of-the-art literature review establish the need for bridging the development and academia divide to make the sustainable livelihood frame work on ground.
Joshi, Bindlish and Verma focus on the contemporary education that still survives in the shadow of colonial hegemony. In the article ‘A Post-colonial Perspective Towards Education in Bharat’, they analyze the roots of educational outcome in the contemporary society in the colonial residue post independence. ‘National Food Security Act, 2013 and Food Security Outcomes’ in India by Amrita Sandhu is a comprehensive analysis of the National Food Security Act and provides insights for taking policy actions to reach the people. The article attempts to understand the effect of the National Food Security Act on food-security outcomes in India in the context of right-to-food discourse and factors behind the perpetual failure in food–security outcomes by applying the food–security measurement framework. The article summaries the needs for policies to look beyond subsidized food-grain assistance to ensure nutritional security.
In essence, the policy environment in India has been shaped by a curious intersection of globalization and localization, growing demands and movements for transparency and accountability and a growing intellectual interest in the study of policy implementation process, the professionalization of the bureaucracy and an institutionalization of the research—policy interface. Ultimately, a problem does not have a meaning of its own; it is the way policy makers interpret the problem to create solutions. With this critical social perspective of policy processes and policy design, this special issue indents to fill the academic vacuum of policy analysis. Our academic endeavour to make policies that are inclusive and sustainable was the impetus for this special issue on public policy and governance. We hope this special issue is able to network interaction within academic discourse weaving across domains and disciplines.