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Public Policy and Governancein India

Avanish KumarVishal Narain

Vision

18(4) 257260

2014 MDI

SAGE Publications

Los Angeles, London,

New Delhi, Singapore,

Washington DC

DOI: 10.1177/0972262914555815

http://vision.sagepub.com

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 organi-

zations have made their presence felt in governance

processes. International NGOs and transnational cor-

porations 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 processescreated 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, ana-lyzed 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 manage-

ment have been introduced by institutes such as IIMs,

Management Development Institute and several central

universities. There are very few political scientists,

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 main-

streaming 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 dis-

courses have emerged that shape policy choices. Several

discourses have been nevertheless reduced to the status of

rhetoric and clich. Emerging demographic trends at the

national levelsuch as urbanizationand environmental

trends at the global levelsuch as climate changehave

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 controland authority in the allocation of resources (World Bank,

1994). Governance issues are thus closely tied to the pro-

cesses 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 gov-

ernance 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 rela-

tions between the state and civil society; while policies

have succeeded in creating management capacity at lowerlevels, 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

Guest Editorial

at Indian Institute of M anagement Ahmedabad on February 11, 2016vis.sagepub.comDownloaded from
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258 Public Policy and Governance in India

Vision, 18, 4 (2014): 257260

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 firstplace, 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 pro-

gramme in higher education, announced by the Ministry of

Human Resource Development, which stresses on engag-

ing Indian students in policy analysis. These initiatives

show a shift from policy-analysis processes towards par-

ticipatory 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 anemergence 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, some-

times, becomes a political risk for policy makers. Thus,

impurity and its effects bring with them the need to inves-

tigate 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 issueshave often treated symptoms rather than causes. This signi-

fies that the reality of the fact must be established for one

to escape the effects of the impurity.

In this backdrop, this issue of VisionThe Journal of

Business Perspectivesexamines 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 throughthe scientific enquiry of the existing literature and analyz-

ing multiple discourses. The articles capture multi-

dimensional public policy issues in India, with particular

reference to fiscal decentralization of municipal corpora-

tion, 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 com-

munity radio as a development tool. These articles seek to

identify ingredients associated with successful public

policy, public action and programme implementation for

problem-solvingbe it issues of policy paralysis due to

ineffective bureaucracy, lack of strategic engagement with

think tanks or gender, education, food-and-nutrition inse-

curity, 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 struc-

tural 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 measur-

ing and mapping the transitory space in Hyderabad. MonicaSinghania and Mayank Sharma, in Trifurcation of MCD:

First Budget as Essential Tool of Governance, analyze the

management tools of installation and innovative develop-

ment of the budgetary system in the trifurcated Municipal

Corporation of New Delhi as a prerequisite to good gov-

ernance. From the peoples 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 areflection of a complex mix of both spatial and a-spatial

phenomena that may be observed at the level of the house-

hold, village, sub-district or district. Understanding peri-

urbanas a place helps identify features and processes that

effectively correspond with ways that stand midway

between completely ruraland 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 andrelevance of voluntary think tanks on policy-making, while

Sangeeta Goels article focuses on bureaucratic attitude.

Both articles focus on government ability to engage and

the public mentality to be distant regarding the participa-

tory process of policy-making, ultimately affecting its

performance. Rahul Singh et al., in Think Tanks, Research

Influence and Public Policy in India, suggest that struc-

tured institutional think tanks in India are a relatively new

phenomena in comparison to the West. In this backdrop,

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Avanish Kumar and Vishal Narain 259

Vision, 18, 4 (2014): 257260

the article analyzes issues of definition and ideology, cred-

ibility in research, governance, funding and interaction on

policy. Bureaucratic AttitudesAn Intermediary Variable

of Policy Performanceby 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 anIndian public organization.

The article by Meerambika Mahapatro traces the gene-

alogy of gender discourse, while Jain and Bhardwaj focus

on understanding diversity as a source or solution of

exclusion.The articleMainstreaming Gender: Shift from

Advocacy to Policy by Mahapatro argues that placing

gender values firmly at all levels and in all sectors requires

a change in the philosophy of conceptualization of gender

within the culturally defined roles, constraints and potenti-

alities. The article concludes that gender mainstreaming is

underdeveloped as a concept and identifies a need to elabo-

rate further on the areas of womens needs, rights and therelationship between gender mainstreaming, policy and

societal change. Understanding Diversity Issues vis--vis

Caste-based Quota System: A Solution or a Source of

Discrimination by Suparna Jain and Gopa Bhardwaj, an

organization-based understanding of 300 employees in the

public sector, reveals the perception on diversity created in

such organizations as a result of an affirmative caste-based

reservation policy. The article provides insights into

improving the stratified situation that arises due to affirma-

tive action in terms of managing diversity created by the

quota system.

Navarun Varma et al.focus on one of the most encom-passing and topical issues of policy debateclimate

change, disaster and development for adoptive govern-

ance; while Sumit Vijs article captures the untamed urban-

ization, 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 vulner-

ability, capacity and resilience have been particularly

strong and structuring within the disaster-risk-reduction

literature where both the concepts of vulnerability andcapacity emerged in the 1970s and 1980s (Gaillard, 2010).

Since then, they have sustained discourses on sustainable

development and climate change mitigation and adapta-

tion. Addressing governance challenges in the face of

climate change, the article by Navarun Varma et al. high-

lights 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 Com-munity Radios as a Developmental Intervention by

Madhukar Shukla emphasizes the value of reinstating

locally suited policy instruments for appropriate sustaina-

ble development. At the time when information access and

utilization are critical agents of transformation, Shuklas

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 communi-

ties. It highlights the role of Community Radio Stations in

promoting development by democratizing access to infor-mation. Patnaik and Prasad in Revisiting Sustainable

Livelihoods: Insights from Implementation Studies in

India, through state-of-the-art literature reviewestablish

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 foodsecurity outcomes by applying the foodsecurity

measurement framework. The article summaries the needs

for policies to look beyond subsidized food-grain assis-

tance to ensure nutritional security.

In essence, the policy environment in India has been

shaped by a curious intersection of globalization and local-

ization, growing demands and movements for transparencyand accountability and a growing intellectual interest in the

study of policy implementation process, the professionali-

zation of the bureaucracy and an institutionalization of the

researchpolicy 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

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260 Public Policy and Governance in India

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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 aca-

demic discourse weaving across domains and disciplines.

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