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5 - State–Local Relations
- Babu Jacob, Suraj Jacob
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- 09 December 2021, pp 141-167
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Summary
For decades, India's constitutional framework had two government levels, national and state. The 74th constitutional amendment (CA) added a third, local government, by devolving some functions of the state government. This implied a change in state–local relations. The reforms recognised that past efforts at decentralisation were ineffective due to inadequate devolution, irregular elections and prolonged supersession – all controlled by state governments loathe to give up authority and power. To recalibrate state–local relations, the CA laid out the manner of holding local elections and raising resources for city governments and also listed the functions to be devolved. But in India local governance falls under the authority of state legislatures. Much is involved in translating the intent of the national CA to the actual resetting of state–local relations. And in fact, by the time the intent was translated – through state laws, rule-making and policy implementation – there was considerable drift and distortion in many states.
Following the CA, each state legislature was expected to pass accompanying legislation for decentralisation. The new state law would carve out the field of action for local governments to exercise their new policy functions. Decentralisation law could vary considerably across states in principle, and this in fact occurred. Among all states, Kerala's law has the most elaborate list of municipal functions (27 groups of items), leading to scholar-bureaucrat K. C. Sivaramakrishnan's optimism about robust decentralisation and accountability. And yet such expanded lists hide more than they reveal.
For implementing the provisions of a law, the legislature specifies which details should be worked out and by whom. This is done through ‘rule-making’, that is, constructing the ‘rules of the (decentralisation) game’ by elaborating upon the laws through rules. The details of ceding of authority from state to local government lie in the rules. The legislature usually authorises the executive or a specific agency of the executive to frame rules. The content of the rules is greatly affected by the identity and outlook of the entity making the rules. In the case of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, rule-making authority was given to the state government whereas in Gujarat it was given to local governments. When the state government makes rules, its contents are usually developed by the state bureaucracy under a minister. When the local government makes rules, its contents are decided by the council, a body of elected representatives.
Part IV - Institutions, Policies and Implementation
- Babu Jacob, Suraj Jacob
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Summary
Parts II and III contained primarily empirical chapters opening the black box of local government for detailing capacity and accountability. Part IV builds on this empirical material to theorise the relationships that constitute de facto decentralisation and how politics, institutions and policies together forge capacity and accountability.
Chapter 7 assimilates the empirical insights from previous chapters to theorise decentralisation. It looks closely at the literature and presents a definition of de facto decentralisation that emphasises autonomy and capacity. Theorising this concept involves exploring relationships between elected representatives and bureaucrats in local and state governments. The chapter also surveys the literature on capacity and explores the conceptual connections between autonomy, facilitation and capacity.
Chapter 8 focuses on decentralisation policy, that is, the formulation and implementation of a framework and actions to create a new tier of government, which is more than merely delegation of authority by the devolving government. Discussions and detailing of decentralisation policy have been completely outside the space of local government and within that of state and national government. The chapter traces the implementation of decentralisation policy after the spirit and intent was laid down through national constitutional amendment. It explores processes of lawmaking, setting up of rule-making authority, creation of rules of local government functioning – and oversight over all these to ensure against policy drift. Effectively, these shaped the patterns of state–local relations and capacity described in Parts II and III.
Chapter 9 weaves together the understanding developed in previous chapters to consider how to effectively implement decentralisation policy in Indian contexts. It takes a broad policy perspective rather than being confined to the perspective of any one policymaker or policy organisation. The chapter suggests possible changes that can be made feasibly in Indian contexts regarding specifics of laws and particularly rule-making authority. It also considers pragmatic ways to reset state–local relations to enhance local government capacity through autonomy and facilitation. And it underlines the critical role of community mobilisation and how policy instruments can strengthen it by respecting spaces of participation and contestation.
List of Figures and Boxes
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Glossary
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Contents
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Preface
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- By Suraj Jacob
- Babu Jacob, Suraj Jacob
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Summary
Years ago, my son Suraj, then a research student, wanted to know how the government works and asked me to write about it. Despite long years in the Indian Administrative Service, I little knew how to describe how government works. I made a note in my mind.
Towards the end of my administrative career, I began to feel that I could work not just within existing frames of government but more importantly, on the frame of government itself, to make actions and outcomes more effective. That was a breakthrough. The product was an innovative, participatory approach to creating road infrastructure. It involved reconceiving how to get something done within a specific domain of the government, drafting and facilitating a law (the Kerala Road Fund Board Act) and a new way of organising the work and decisions around it. One of its projects was a capital city road programme that brought different actors together: the mayor, city councillors, state legislators, and other politicians and bureaucrats. Frequent interactions with the mayor and councillors energised the programme considerably. I began appreciating the deep potential of local leadership for local action. Local elections had been stabilised by then. They generated leaders with remarkable capabilities, interest in city development and intimacy with city localities. I wondered how well they were performing. The monsoons were a good opportunity to gauge this. In the capital city, the annual stormwater surge inundates downtown areas just across from the state government headquarters and floods the central bus and railway terminals. As an almost repeat annual feature, government ministers rush to the spot and hold conferences while the mayor looks on helplessly. Getting stormwater flushed out – could the mayor's team not do it? This was a dramatic instance of the fact that even with constitutional changes to empower city government, local leaders were not running local public affairs. It needed the state government to drain out stormwater, and that too, not one government minister but four because it concerned four departments (water, roads, transport and local government). And did the four ministers succeed? No. After a while, a government order (GO) was issued to proclaim that the problem should be resolved. Each department – by this time the number of concerned departments had climbed to a dozen – went on to do one thing or the other but ultimately the GO could not get them to address the problem.
Index
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1 - Two Cities
- Babu Jacob, Suraj Jacob
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The 1990s witnessed a deep change in India – a constitutional amendment, no less – that redefined decentralised governance. The reforms emphasised the democratic character of local governments and, in the case of cities, provided them many policy functions: infrastructural services such as water supply, sewerage, drainage, solid waste management and street lighting as well as education, public health, environmental management, poverty reduction and economic development. Together, these encompass wide possibilities for individual well-being and social justice. The beginning of the 1990s had already triggered a structural change in India's political economy and governance through a shift in the tectonic plates of mandal, mandir and market. The decentralisation reforms added to these. The broad sweep of the reforms created considerable expectations about the new possibilities. We begin by trying to understand governance in two specific cities. From the thousands of city governments in India, this chapter presents contrasting narratives for two – Trivandrum on the southern and Surat on the western coast.
Trivandrum is an erstwhile slow-paced city where pre-Independence royalty built progressive institutions and created public service systems. As the capital of the modern Kerala state, it houses public offices and, in recent post-liberalisation decades, also has thriving commercial and technological activity. Following the national decentralisation reforms, Kerala led India's states in efforts to operationalise it. Kerala's laws being particularly wide-ranging, Trivandrum too enjoyed a high degree of latitude in its decentralisation framework compared to cities in other states.
Surat is a bustling old commercial centre famous for specialised industries as diverse as textiles, diamonds and chemicals. The industrial landscape has attracted a considerable number of migrants. About a quarter-century ago, and soon after the decentralisation reforms, Surat experienced an outbreak of plague that suggested public health failure but also showed proactive response by the local government (Shah 1997b). Surat is located in the state of Gujarat, which, unlike Kerala, is seldom feted for decentralisation. However, under an old legislative provision, even prior to the decentralisation reforms, the city government had authority and responsibility over several local policy domains.
A 2017 survey benchmarks city government performance in 23 cities, including Trivandrum and Surat. It ranks both cities in the top five. However, Surat ranks better on ‘governance’ indicators while Trivandrum ranks better on ‘democracy’ indicators (Table 1.1).
8 - Governing Locally: Institutions and Policies
- Babu Jacob, Suraj Jacob
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The previous chapter examined different views of decentralisation and presented a framework of de facto decentralisation. The present chapter turns to the policy question of how governments go about implementing decentralisation.
How did India implement its decentralisation policy? In the conventional narrative, following the crystallisation of policy intent in the 73rd and 74th constitutional amendments (CAs), state legislatures enacted accompanying legislation and state executives implemented the new laws. Two aspects of policy intent were implemented in a robust manner: regular, competitive local government elections organised by independent State Election Commissions (SECs); and transfer of funds from the state government to local governments using transparent formulas devised by independent State Finance Commissions (SFCs). On paper state governments ‘devolved’ several important functions (street lighting, water supply, urban planning, and so on) to city governments. Do these developments – regular elections and funds transfer as well as de jure transfer of functions – make for de facto decentralisation? Much of the literature has implicitly concluded that de facto decentralisation did happen. But in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, water supply, sewerage and other services continued to be provided by the state government, as revealed by the detailed examples in Parts II and III. Since decentralised governance is at the heart of decentralised service delivery, the chapter examines the implementation of the policy to decentralise governance.
The first section develops a framework to explain policy implementation in the Indian context. The key actors in the policy process are the state bureaucracy, the state political executive and the state legislature. The key elements in the policy process are state laws, rule-making authority, the rules themselves and oversight over all these elements. It turns out that, across states, decentralisation policy was implemented in a centralised manner. State legislatures and executives consulted neither local governments nor the public regarding how to implement decentralisation.1 This is particularly odd in Kerala where a large literature emphasises the important role of local agency and community organisations in shaping public action for development outcomes in past decades (V. K. Ramachandran 1997; Tharakan 1997). The second section discusses policy implementation in Kerala and how ‘policy drift’ emerged. The state's decentralisation policy in the 1990s prescribed that most local initiatives, and much of local change, must hew to narrow, inflexible, non-contextualised parameters set by the state government – giving a very small ‘decision space’ to local governments.
List of Tables
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Dedication
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List of Abbreviations
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Part I - Background
- Babu Jacob, Suraj Jacob
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Service delivery, especially in urban areas, is a hot-button issue. Piles of garbage in city centres, blackouts in streets, patchy piped water – such realities have inspired activism, investigation and scholarly work. In India, public services are seen as the responsibility of the government but there is a widespread perception that it is heavy-handed, ineffective and unjust. Decentralisation is often seen as a mantra to address such problems: locating governance in local populations and reducing the distance between the ‘government’ and the ‘governed’. Proponents hope that decentralisation will make public service provision – and governance, more broadly – responsive to local needs in general and particularly the well-being of those with precarious lives and livelihoods. Reduced distance between the government and the governed also deepens democracy so that people participate in governance. This is the double allure of decentralisation.
The ability of decentralised governance to pursue the common good, enhance public services and deepen democracy is hardly assured. Powerful national and global technologies of rule threaten local possibilities and local action. Authoritarianism and the dominance of big capital are important concerns. Local government can also be upended by locally dominant groups. Nevertheless, lurking authoritarianism, ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘local capture’ do not overwhelm the transformative potential of local government. For much of India, we see a reality in which strong local possibilities exist. The ability of local government to pursue the common good and enhance public services can be greatly strengthened by institutional features of government. Indeed, we already see instances of conducive institutional features – hardly perfect, but showing considerable possibilities for local government. The stakes for democracy are high: if local government does not ‘work’ effectively and justly, it can compromise people's belief in engaging with governance, thereby compromising democratic deepening.
The two chapters of Part I engage with governance and decentralisation. Chapter 1 introduces the main arguments by comparing two cities with very different realities of decentralisation and patterns of urban governance. It raises the basic puzzle of why the cities are very different and why major nationwide reforms failed to substantially change these realities. Chapter 2 broadens the two-city comparison and advances systemic explanations for the difference, applicable more broadly across the country. It addresses these puzzles and presents answers arising primarily from the political-institutional features of the government rather than meta modes of governance or inequalities of social structure, important as these are.
2 - Approach and Argument
- Babu Jacob, Suraj Jacob
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Chapter 1 generated two puzzles of local governance. The first puzzle is why Surat and Trivandrum exhibit considerably different patterns of governance; it is indicative of state-level differences and the influence of history and institutions. The second puzzle is why India's major decentralisation reforms of the 1990s did not create a rising tide to lift Trivandrum's boat and that of other cities. Those reforms addressed many factors that could enhance local governance: changing laws, transferring resources, instituting regular elections and mandating forums for public participation. Although important, they proved to be insufficient. A plausible explanation of decentralisation outcomes will need to disaggregate these factors and explore the processes of implementation of the idealistic policy intent of the 1990s reforms. Such analysis leads us to emphasise institutional features of policy. Politics and power relations are never far in the account laid out in this chapter; they form the crucible for processes around governance.
Since explanations of such governance puzzles invoke the past, this chapter starts with a brief history. Appendix 2A presents a more detailed history of decentralisation and urban governance in India. Since colonial times, local governance was placed in the domain of provincial rather than national government, an arrangement that continues even today. For decades after Independence, local governance was a pushover and whatever residual emphasis was given to it went to rural rather than urban local government. A watershed moment occurred with the constitutional reforms of the 1990s. The official statement observed:
In many States local bodies have become weak and ineffective on account of a variety of reasons, including the failure to hold regular elections, prolonged supersessions and inadequate devolution of powers and functions. As a result, Urban Local Bodies are not able to perform effectively as vibrant democratic units of self-government.
The 74th constitutional amendment (CA) adopted in April 1993 conveyed the intent that state government transfer a wide spectrum of urban policy functions to city governments. This was ‘to enable them to function as institutions of self-government’. The CA also laid out how city governments were to be constituted and the method of election and sharing of public resources between the state government and local governments. The CA required that state legislatures work out the details of decentralisation, and the states responded by enacting legislation.
Part II - Local Capacity
- Babu Jacob, Suraj Jacob
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In popular imagination today, ‘government’ invokes differing images: corridors of power and labyrinths of incompetence. There is, on the one hand, the wielding and misuse of power shaping our very consciousness. And on the other hand, there is ineptitude and arbitrariness. To explain patterns of local action and public services, Part II asks: How do local governments actually function? It turns to two interrelated dimensions of government functioning – how it takes and implements decisions (Chapter 3) and how it is organised (Chapter 4) – which together form local government ‘capacity’.
Local capacity has both a performance-orientation and a citizen-orientation. For Fiszbein (1997, 1031), it ‘involves the existence and adequate functioning of mechanisms through which the community can voice demands, channels by which authorities can translate those demands into actions and instruments for government accountability’. There are many nuts and bolts to effective practices that enhance capacity: decision-making and monitoring; organisational structure and distribution of responsibilities; skills and personnel policies (reward systems, career mobility, work planning and appraisal); leadership and management style; generating, managing and analysing information and creating feedback loops; managing relationships (with citizens’ organisations, other governments, suppliers, businesses, and so on); and managing equipment, materials and buildings.
Chapter 3, on government practices, explores how city government attends to matters. How are decisions taken? What administrative procedures are in place for planning and delivering services? These matters make up the everyday substance of local government. The chapter also discusses urban planning, a ‘meta’ capacity that can enable the city government to conceptualise space, integrate interventions and enhance equity in access to public services. Chapter 4, on organisation, explores the horizontal departmental and vertical hierarchical patterns inside the organisation of the city government and also goes into details of staffing. Administrative procedures, organisational form and staffing together constitute the capacity of the local government to undertake effective and just local action. Once capacity has been so mapped out, it provides an explanation of observed local action. This raises the further question of what makes capacity what it is, which is explored in Part III.
Acknowledgements
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6 - Participation in City Governments
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There is no gainsaying the importance of community participation in meaningful decentralisation. The notion of involving the public is natural and inherent to the concept of local governance. Chapter 2 argued that along with state–local relations, community participation is critical for ensuring effective and just local action and deepening democracy in governance. Where does ‘participation’ occur in decentralised governance? What shapes it? How is it linked to local government action and outcomes? These are the questions explored in this chapter.
The chapter begins by exploring the literature on public participation and contestation in governance. The next section turns to formal spaces of participation envisaged in decentralisation provisions in states and compares these with the lukewarm realities of participation. This is not to deny instances of strong participation; the section uses examples to suggest that these tend to be idiosyncratic rather than systemic. Based on the empirical findings, the final section discusses the conditions for sustained participation, focusing on the role of strong social intermediation as well as credible expectations that public participation can influence local government capacity and action.
Participation and Contestation: The Literature
The aspiration regarding ‘people's participation’ is that ‘broad involvement of a conscientized and mobilized citizenry would lead to a higher and sustainable popular engagement with public policy at a societal level’ (Blair 2020, 68), which is indeed an important animus for decentralisation in the first place. Participation has come to be regarded both as an important end in itself and as a means to other desirable outcomes. But structural factors such as economic class and local social hierarchies can overwhelm opportunities for participation. For central India, Sundar (2001) observes that ‘participatory committees’ meant for forest-dwelling communities are actually controlled by government staff and that such interventions end up extending government control.
Although it is difficult to identify the propitious conditions for genuine participation, nevertheless ‘participation’ is ubiquitous in articulations of governance and stands co-opted from multiple sides, unfortunately hollowing out its meaning. It has been adopted by international development funders and governments collaborating with them as well as by their ideological opponents. Similar is the case with ‘inclusion’, a term that is often used after diluting the centrality of power and inequality inherent to concepts of social and distributive justice (Coelho and Maringanti 2012; Bhattacharyya 2016).
7 - Theorising Decentralisation
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This chapter places the observations from previous chapters into a broader framework for analysing decentralisation. Field insights about local government capacity and autonomy point to the importance of focusing on the relationships between politicians and bureaucrats across and within the state government and local governments. Rather than present a full theory, the chapter engages in ‘theorising’ – that is, what Swedberg (2016, 8) describes as exploring ‘the context of discovery and the context of justification’ that precede a statement of theory. The approach takes seriously Geertz's (1973, 24) point about being light and staying close to the ground when attempting to reason in formal, conceptual ways (‘ratiocination’):
… the need for theory to stay rather closer to the ground than tends to be the case in sciences more able to give themselves over to imaginative abstraction. Only short flights of ratiocination tend to be effective … longer ones tend to drift off into logical dreams, academic bemusements with formal symmetry.
The first section surveys the profusion of meanings associated with the term ‘decentralisation’ in the literature. Building on this, the following section distils a specific understanding of ‘de facto decentralisation’ that goes beyond formal (de jure) pronouncements of decentralisation to emphasise local government autonomy and capacity. The third section surveys arguments and explanations for decentralisation in general. Much of this literature is biased towards the rural; works on urban areas focus less on decentralisation (Carter and Post 2019; Rodden and Wibbels 2019) and more on urban contestation. We explore the theoretical literature on ‘why (de)centralisation?’ but viewing it as a spectrum rather than a binary. We also briefly consider explanations for (de)centralisation and why in practice decentralisation takes the form it does. The last section advances a framework to analyse decentralisation where the emphasis is on relationships between bureaucrats and elected political representatives in the state government and local governments. The section draws from the literature surveyed in the previous sections as well as the empirical material of Parts II and III. The framework helps to situate observations regarding city governments in Kerala, Gujarat and elsewhere. Since the emphasis is on how these relationships affect local capacity, we also survey the literature on capacity and discuss how capacity is related to decentralised governance.
3 - Running City Governments
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Following the decentralisation reforms, city governments were expected to perform a wider and more complex set of policy functions than before. For infrastructure services, they needed physical systems, processing plants and distribution networks previously controlled by the state government. Importantly, they also needed to plan, coordinate and implement in more complex ways, for which they needed new work systems, procedures and implementation methods – which state agencies had developed over the years. City governments would also need to transform themselves into ‘policy entrepreneurs’ (Montero and Samuels 2004; Petridou and Mintrom 2020).
It is in grassroots implementation that any policy finds its ultimate shape, whatever be the intent, as shown by Lipsky (2010) and others. For decentralised service delivery, the final implementer is the local government. It is in the local government that new work procedures have to emerge and sustain. ‘Work procedures’ are the specific methods and sequences through which decisions are taken and implemented within the government organisation. If a bulb in a streetlight fails, how does the local government proceed to respond? If there is a request to extend the sewerage line to a new neighbourhood, how does the local government tackle it? Sound procedures should bring about the intended outcome in an effective and fair manner, apart from being legally compliant.
Local governments also have to devise new procedures to deal with multiple agencies and actors, both within the government and outside it. Previously, specific departments were ‘owners’ of specific policy outputs whereas policy implementation permeates departmental boundaries in the present era of network governance. Hence, emphasis should be on interconnected policy implementation processes rather than only the ability to manage government departments and operations (Conteh and Huque 2014). Local governments need to not only renew their in-house procedures of work but also develop capabilities to deal with matters that cross organisational boundaries. But among our three chosen states, Tamil Nadu and particularly Kerala city governments did not develop such capabilities. An elected representative in Thrissur (Kerala) notes:
It is difficult to get things done here. The minister knows this but is not able to push [for effective implementation]. We propose many city projects, but nothing comes of them, we are not able to implement [them]. There are many problems. Project ideas and project efforts are wasted.
References
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