Grassroots Democracy Research Articles

DEMOCRATIC DECENTRALIZATION AND DEVOLUTION OF POWERS AT THE GRASSROOTS LEVEL DEMOCRACY: ISSUES CHALLENGES AND IMPLICATIONS

This article attempts to evaluate the Grassroots democracy and the problems which are associated with the ineffective functioning of Panchayati Raj Institutions. It argues that how constitutional provision has created a scope for accomplishing development with social justice, which is the mandate of the new Panchayat Raj system. The new system brings all those who are interested to have a voice in decision making through their participation in Panchayat Raj Institutions. How it becomes the Panchayati Raj system is the basis for the Social Justice and Empowerment of the weaker section on which the development initiative has to be built upon for achieving overall, human welfare of the society. My research paper also analyses the working status and various issues and challenges of PRIs for 26 years after the 73rd constitutional amendment establishment of panchayats and municipalities as elected local governments devolved a range of powers and responsibilities and made them accountable to the people for their implementation, very little and actual progress has been made in this direction. Local governments remain hamstrung and ineffective mere agents to do the bidding of higher-level governments. Democracy has not been enhanced despite about 32 lakh peoples representatives being elected to them every five years, with great expectation and fanfare. My study would explore the grey areas such as lack of adequate funds, domination of bureaucracy, untimely elections, lack of autonomy, the interference of area MPS and MLAs in the functioning of panchayats also adversely affected their performance.

Impact of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act on Enhancing Socio-economic Conditions of Rural Households

Employment is fundamental pre-requisite to raise per capita income and eradicate household poverty. After independence and particularly from the Fifth Five Year Plan onwards, Government of India has initiated several rural development programmes for raising rural employment for the alleviation of rural poverty. The present study was carried out over 240 respondents in Samastipur district of Bihar to find out Impact of MGNREGA on the socio-economic conditions of the rural people. The study revealed that the impact of the Act has been found to be of medium level as have been reported by 52.92% of the beneficiaries. The components wise impact in terms of economic, social, health, psychological, environmental, infrastructural and institutional impact were evaluated. The results revealed that under economic impact employment in agricultural lean period with the mean score value of 2.64% observed first and under social impact the substantial impact have been recorded in the area of increased social mobility. In case of impact on health and hygiene, majority of male beneficiaries (46.67%) represent that there was a substantial impact on improvement in the nutritional security. While in case of psychological, environmental, infrastructural and institutional impact was found in the thought is being developed to become self-employed in near future, conservation of natural resources, enhanced rural connectivity and strengthening grass-root democracy, respectively. Keywords: Impact, MGNREGA, Socio-economic conditions, Beneficiaries.

Review of Blessed are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America by Jeffrey Stout

This is a requested book review of Jeffrey Stout's book Blessed are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America.

The Paris Commune and Grassroots Democracy

One hundred and fifty years ago on March 18, 1871, the Paris Commune declared itself the governing power in the city of two million and proceeded to build what the Communards called a “Democratic a...

The Authoritarian Commons: Divergent Paths of Neighborhood Democratization in Three Chinese Megacities

Can a liberal commons emerge in an authoritarian regime? Based on an in-depth investigation of the ongoing self-governance movement among hundreds of millions of homeowners in China, this research examines the tension between authoritarianism and liberal commons for the first time. Empirically this research reveals a striking contrast: in Shanghai, 94% of condominium complexes have established homeowners’ associations, a kind of liberal commons, compared with 41% in Shenzhen, and only 12% in Beijing. It is posited in this paper that the authoritarian commons (i.e., the dynamic interactions between the authoritarian state and homeowners’ efforts to create a liberal commons in their neighborhoods) features multiple equilibria that depend on the state capacity and the risks posed by the self-governance movement. A highly capable state facing an intermediate degree of risk can make the institutional reforms necessary to accommodate the grassroots democracy. This research of the authoritarian commons brings the state back to the economic theories of property rights, and brings property, and more specifically, space and territorial control to the study of authoritarianism. It also deepens our understanding of authoritarianism and development.

GANDHIAN IDEAS OF GRASSROOT DEVELOPMENT AND INDIAN DEVELOPMENT POLICY IN 21ST CENTURY (SPECIAL REFERENCE OF PANCHAYAT RAJ INSTITUTIONS)

In the recent times, 'Good Governance' is associated with efficient and effective of administration in a democratic framework and responsiveness of the state and its institutions. The main key elements of 'Good Governance' refer that respect for human rights, equity, rule of law, transparency in public procedure, strong democracy and capacity in public administration.The ideal democracy depends upon the equality of all the purely public opinions. In the same way Gandhian ideas of Panchayat Raj system is a broad concept in independent india and it is a transparency of government in public administration as a part of good governance. It was a concept of diffused grass-roots democracy and process of democratic decentralization. It's a large number of rural people who are directly involved in the field of democratic participation. From ancient times the village has always been regarded as the primary unit in the governance of India. Important govt. policies are implemented through panchayats. The Gram Sabha plays an important role in the whole Panchayat Raj institution in India's democratic system. This is a purely qualitative study. So, Present study is going to focus on the Gandhian point of view Panchayat Raj. This is necessary to development in India 21st century and this conception go ahead powerful in the Nation.

Problems and Prospects of Local Judicial Committee in Nepal

Decentralization and local governance is the base of grassroot democracy, giving strong foundation of democracy at nation. Local governments are the closest unit of people. Constitution of Nepal acknowledges that executive legislative and judicial bodies may be formed at the local level. Constitution provides to consolidate socialism-oriented federal democratic republic governance right from the local level as per the principle of the rule of law and sustainable development through proportionally inclusive and just distribution of the fruits of democracy, and to make necessary provisions in relation to the operation of the local government to institutionalize the legislative, executive and judicial practice at the local level by consolidating local government through development of local leadership. This article aims at examining current provision of judicial power in local government of Nepal, its service delivery status, analyzing challenges of justice delivery. To draw the conclusion in this study descriptive analytical and content analysis method has been used and information has been taken from secondary method.

Rural politics in transitional China: Urban–rural disparity, national integration, and grassroots democracy

This essay reviews three books by Xu Yong that examine three critical historical processes of political transformation in rural China: the politicization of society due to urban–rural disparity, the government’s efforts to encourage political integration in rural areas, and the development of rural grassroots democracy. Urban–rural disparity has been a structural characteristic of China’s politicized society since the establishment of the monarchy. The analysis of this inequality focuses on uncovering grassroots society (as opposed to Chinese society’s upper echelons) and examining its evolutionary logic. Since 1949, China has faced the historical task of building a modern state. The government aggressively entered the countryside through large-scale political mobilization and social integration with the Chinese Communist Party as the driving force. The goal was to create a strongly integrated communist nation. Since the 1980s, the Chinese countryside has not only experienced economic liberalization but also received an opportunity for political democratization through the creation and practice of village autonomy. Self-government in autonomous villages has provided Chinese peasants with a wide range of democratic rights. In addition, calls for transformation and promotion of the democratic paradigm have increased. Xu’s three books effectively present many critical aspects of China’s rural political transformations. However, questions remain concerning the consistency of the theory and the accuracy of the analysis, which leaves room for further research and discussion.

Speaking power to power: Grassroots democracy in the anti-fracking movement in Bulgaria.

The anti-fracking movement (AFM) in Bulgaria, was a successful grassroots local-to-national organizing effort to change public policy. The study draws on social movements, community psychology, and grassroots democracy theory to explore, describe and critique how participants in the AFM collectively constructed meanings and practices of organizing in interaction with the sociopolitical context as they expanded their efforts from the local to the national level of policy-making. Data for the study were collected from semi-structured interviews with activists, movement documents, and participant observations. Structured and open coding followed by qualitative analyses produced descriptions and explanations of grassroots democracy in the movement. The movement was based on a prefigurative vision and practice of an antihierarchical "civic society" and was also shaped by the demands of the Bulgarian political context. Power, consent, and participation had dynamic meanings and forms that secured both grassroots democracy and effective political action. Тhe AFM resisted well-known mechanisms of hierarchization and co-optation, but it also reproduced certain inequalities of power. The findings relate to recent trends for expansion of community organizing to the national level of politics, for expansion of the community organizing models outside the United States, and for a popular grassroots preference for anti-organizational organizing.

Grassroots democracy and development: Learning from the Philippines

The Philippines have developed a system of neighbourhood government that other countries could usefully learn from. The barangays give ordinary citizens a voice in decision-making and assist in devolving power from the centre. They also improve the responsiveness of basic public services to local needs. Above all, the institution recognises and legitimises the contribution that communities can make to a robust civil society. The process of participation and engagement helps to harness the agency and resourcefulness of local residents and means that communities are better organised to cope with adversity. Nevertheless, the barangays could be strengthened by advocating physical improvements to their areas and mobilising for additional investment in neighbourhood infrastructure and reconstruction of the built environment.

Creating sites of community education and democracy: Henry Morris and the Cambridgeshire village colleges. A reflection 90 years on from their inception

This article investigates the work of Henry Morris (1889–1961), in particular his ideas on the Cambridgeshire village colleges. It is now 90 years since the first of these was founded in Sawston in 1930, and the article aims to address the issue of whether Morris’s views on education and democracy encapsulated in the village colleges still have relevancy in the early twenty‐first century. An overview of Morris’s career and the creation of the village colleges is investigated, using the work of Paul Hirst and associative democracy as a theoretical lens. It is argued that the Cambridgeshire village colleges do have some attributes of associative democracy, particularly their original emphasis as sites of local democracy and participation from voluntary bodies and private individuals. However, Morris’s role as Cambridgeshire’s Chief Education Officer (1922–1954) meant that the local state (in the guise of the County Council) played a more significant role in the village colleges than Hirst advocates for his version of associative democracy. As English primary and secondary schools turn from local authority control to academy status, Morris’s vision for local schools of and for local people is becoming increasingly compromised. The article ends with the work of Allen and Gann, both influenced by Morris, who argue for a revitalised form of comprehensive schooling and lifelong learning that again sees educational institutions as sites of grassroots democracy.

The Decentralization, Devolution and Local Governance Practices in Nepal: The Emerging Challenges and Concerns

Nepal has been facing political changes and systems over the decades. Presently Nepal has adopted the unitary federal political system. Under the system, devolution of power is shared to local levels in order to strengthen localism and development. The devolution is a broader concept of decentralization where power and authority are provided to a sub-national level of government constitutionally. This paper discusses the devolution and its implication on local levels that are directly related to local people and grass-roots democracy. The Constitution of Nepal 2015, Local Government Operations Act 2017, Inter Governmental Fiscal Transfer Act 2017 and other sectoral legislation and published related documents are reviewed for this paper. Besides, three numbers of local levels (rural municipalities) are taken as an empirical inquiry to find out the problems and challenges facing by local levels. The Constitution of Nepal 2015 provided enough power and authority to the local levels based on devolution under federalism. Despite that, the inadequacy of laws, and policies, and lacking coordination between local levels and center-province and poor mobilization are major challenges to local levels and the question of good governance and leadership is more pronounced in this regard. The relationship among the center, province and local levels is still debatable. Overall, the present collateral form of local governance is not being well functioned. The effectiveness of Leadership seems to be important to cope with local governance for local development and grass-roots democracy.

Cost-benefit analysis at the floodgates: Governing democratic futures through the reassembly of Iran's waterways.

A burgeoning scholarship has taken seriously the use and management of the world's fresh water as a site of critical investigation, highlighting the contribution of science and technology studies in making the infrastructural life of water visible. However, studies say little about the calculative terms of the decision-making process involved in infrastructural appraisal which are often taken for granted as something inevitable. This article examines the unexpected and remarkable role that cost-benefit analysis played in governing Iran's democratic future through the assembling of a dam in the mid-20th century. Indeed, cost-benefit analysis traveled the world via flows of water. I investigate the ways in which the calculation of risk generated by the device of cost-benefit analysis of neoclassical economics became over several decades the most influential language for explaining and organizing the relationship between humans and nature in southwest Iran. The waters of the Dez River and other major rivers of the world shaped the building of large-scale infrastructural projects around dams, but they were simultaneously entangled with the production of economic information about the costs and benefits to local areas, making possible the development of new methods of governing democracies in terms of risk. US-based government aid agencies, institutions of global economic governance, private American investors, engineers, and agricultural scientists converged in a small corner of Iran to transform the region, its water, and its farmers into a laboratory of grass-roots democracy for a profit.

Village Elections, Grassroots Governance and the Restructuring of State Power: An Empirical Study in Southern Peri-urban China

AbstractChina's urbanization has revitalized grassroots governance under which millions of villagers have become increasingly keen to participate in grassroots elections and influence decision making in their village affairs. To maintain its political legitimacy over a rapidly transforming society, the authoritarian party-state has progressively promoted open, competitive grassroots elections in response to the increasing demand by villagers for more public participation. Based on in-depth field research in urbanizing villages in southern China, this article provides an empirical analysis of how the local state has adopted different interventionist strategies in elections to support villagers’ active participation while sustaining its direct leadership over daily village governance. Our findings explain why the recent development of open and transparent grassroots elections is reinforcing the ruling capacity of the socialist state rather than enhancing self-governance and grassroots democracy, although villagers now have more opportunities to defend their economic and social rights through elections.

Rejecting ‘all the faces of subjugation’: Daniel Guérin on direct democracy, self-management and individual autonomy

ABSTRACTThis article examines the ideas of French writer and revolutionary Daniel Guérin (1904–88), focussing on his conception of democracy. It argues that Guérin’s thinking developed from the ‘macro-social’ to the ‘micro-social’ as his ideological perspective changed. In the 1940s and 50s, Guérin’s unorthodox Marxist approach to the historiography of the French Revolution and his adoption of a Kropotkinian emphasis on the grassroots democracy of the sans-culotte movement led him to see the Revolution as representing the birth of a ‘new type of democracy’. Some form of direct democracy was the only structure which was compatible with what he saw as true, essentially libertarian socialism. In the 1950s and 60s, these conclusions led him to shift the focus of his research onto the history of anarchism and of worker self-management, anarchism’s most important contribution to socialist and democratic thought. Democracy in the workplace, he argued, was the essential corollary of the abolition of private property and the socialisation of the economy. Finally, in the 1960s and 70s, partly because of his own struggles with heteronormativity and having discovered Stirner, he focussed on disalienation and personal autonomy. Each of these three levels of liberation was seen as a precondition of an authentic socialist democracy.

Whose Extension Counts? A Plurality of Extensions and Their Implications for Credible Evidence Debates

The debate over what counts as credible evidence often occurs on a methodological level (i.e., about what technical applications of systematic inquiry provide believable, justifiable claims about a program). Less often, it occurs on an epistemological level (i.e., about what ways of knowing are appropriate for making claims about a program). Even less often, the debate touches on ontological concerns (i.e., about what conceptualizations of reality, in general or in relation to a specific program, are in play when we wish to make claims about that program). For example, whether we understand Extension to be a vehicle for the dissemination of scientific knowledge or a site of grassroots democracy matters when we seek to evaluate Extension with credibility. The purpose of this paper is to examine the credible evidence debates through an ontological lens, showing why and how different narratives (or different realities) of Extension must be considered when we seek credible evidence about Extension.

Space of Green Politics in South Asia: Myth Or Reality?

Green politics is a political ideology comprises social progress through sustainable development, peace, social justice, and grass-root democracy. Green politics is an evolving trend in world politics emerged in 1970s and revolutionized the political scenarios after the mid-80s with the discovery of ‘Ozone Hole’ in 1984. Currently, green or eco political parties are popular in many advance countries such as Germany, France, UK, Netherland, and Spain etc. Regions which present a bleak picture on eco-politics are backward in environmental sustainability, and same is the case with South Asia. Environment is considered a secondary thing in South Asia; because region is already tackling the primary goals of life such as food, shelter, inflation, health, and education etc. Until achieving these goals; eco-politics will remain an illusion in South Asia despite facing many environmental related challenges. Hence, environmental slogans are not Asian political parties. Yet, there are some conservation and reforestation projects such as a billion-tree project in KPK of Pakistan or KFCC (Kerala forest conservation campaign) etc. South Asia is prone to climate change and global warming; Karachi, Mumbai, and Maldives are in the immediate threat to be drowned till 2050 if the sea level keeps rising due to the melting of glaciers. Hence, the need is to focus on more environmental oriented political programs before it is too latepopular in the region. There is a nominal finding about environment in the manifestoes of South.

Dealing with Undeniable Differences in Thessaloniki’s Solidarity Economy of Food

In the context of capitalist crisis, a re-emergence of reciprocal economic relationships has been praised by postcapitalist researchers. Self-organised solidarity food economies have indeed brought promise of democratic change. However, this article draws on two years of fieldwork in Thessaloniki to develop Iris Young’s Politics of Difference in order to challenge the view of solidarity economy as wholly a process of collaboration. Thus, the article overturns prevalent myths regarding the cultural ineptitude of Greek actors. In doing so, it highlights the need for food movements to acknowledge the inevitable tensions that arise from structural inequalities. The article argues that overcoming these tensions requires challenging difference-blindness in grassroots democracy. It concludes that an acknowledgement of shifting structural inequalities, exaggerated by the economic crisis, must be incorporated into an initiative’s democratic processes alongside mechanisms for dealing with disharmony.

Anti-Displacement Movement and Development Democracy a Study on Keezhattur Protest in Kerala

India has a history of displacing people for ‘development’; its genesis can be traced to the colonial administration. The 1894 Land Acquisition Act proves how State and bureaucracy define the rights of the people displaced. The ideas of development always triumph over displacement, and both parliamentary discourse and State establishments are positioned in favour of development. Hence, an anti-displacement perspective is considered anti-development as well as anti-State. There are local-centric movements to oppose displacement which are mainly criticized for not taking into account the development interest at large. However, being local-centric is a strength of these movements as it accommodates grass root democracy. This paper discusses the issue of development democracy in the context of the local protest in Keezhattur, Kerala. It is a locally grounded movement against the land acquisition for a highway project. The government is for the project while the opposition parties are against it simply by virtue of being in the opposition. No political party in Kerala genuinely opposes the project. The movements are treated as against the development. The oppositional pol- itics is local while the project is national. The people of Kerala do not have a reason to be with the protestors since the project is for a highway connecting the State with national mainland.

From Carbon Democracy to Carbon Rebellion: Countering Petro-Hegemony on the Frontlines of Climate Justice

This essay combines salient instances of climate justice activism in key battlegrounds against the fossil fuel industry in the United States and Canada with theoretical interventions in studies of corporate power, grassroots democracy, and counter hegemony. It explores Timothy Mitchell's Carbon Democracy and the term’s relevance to understanding the conditions in which climate justice activists must combat the entrenched interests of fossil fuel companies. It suggests that Carbon Democracy is a helpful concept for understanding how fossil fuel dependency both shapes and distorts democratic governance. Drawing upon insights in three case studies - activism against Chevron in Richmond California, the Water Protectors and the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock, and the First Nations-led fight against the Trans Mountain Pipeline in British Columbia - the essay supplements Carbon Democracy with two more terms: Petro-Hegemony and Carbon Rebellion. These reveal three power relations, namely consent, compliance, and coercion, upon which fossil fuel companies depend and in which climate justice activists must strategically intervene to move beyond conditions of Carbon Democracy. I show that dual power is a logic of strategic intervention that climate justice activists are successfully using to intervene in all three of these relations to reign in corporate power and assert their own sovereignty.