Local State-Society Relations Research Articles

Governance in Europe: insights from a survey among actors involved in local state-society relations

This article presents results of an empirical study on local governance in a number of European countries carried out by a group of scholars who has conducted surveys of various local political actors for many years. The results of these studies, which have been published in two books, will be assessed with regard to central questions of the governance debate. These include, among other things, questions of the understanding of democracy as well as the representational claims of the social actors involved. Moreover, it is emphasised that surveys are central to finding out how actors assess institutional conditions under which they have to act, i.?e. how they perceive institutional opportunities and limitations for their political choices.

From Government–Society to Party–Masses: The Community Governance Mode Change in Shenzhen

Most urban community studies in China rely on the state–society framework. However, this structural perspective can hardly explain the diverse modes of community governance and their changes over time. This article outlines Shenzhen's 20-year (1999–2019) history of community reform and constructs a framework based on historical institutionalism to analyse Shenzhen's community governance modes over various periods and their changes. First, diversified governance ideas and power structures constructed various community governance modes over this period. Second, community governance mode changes were embedded in local grassroots governance fields. The original governance arrangements, the policy guidance and the ideas of the dominant agencies (the Ministry of Civil Affairs and the Party) at different stages are critical in explaining the transformation of community governance modes. Third, the dominant subject's institutional bricolage within the constraints and empowerment of the institutional context was the critical mechanism of the governance mode transformation. The historical institutionalism framework for community governance transformation provides a new direction for understanding community reform and evaluating evolving local state–society relations.

Across the stolen Ponds: The political geography of social welfare in rural eastern India

• Non-homogeneous political incentives are found to determine social welfare provisions in rural India. • On ground distributive politics around welfare provision is shaped by innovative forms of clientelist transactions. • Political alignment patterns within local governments are decisive in shaping distributive outcomes. • Underlying social structures and practices can inhibit democratic decentralisation initiatives. Despite a strong state and a slew of poverty reduction/welfare programmes, the provision of basic services to the rural poor in India remains puzzlingly inadequate. Moving away from the usual trend of aggregate welfare impact analysis that characterises most studies on this theme, we explore the on-ground distributive politics around the implementation of India’s flagship social welfare programme, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS). Based on a mixed-method study in the state of West Bengal, using observational primary data and ethnographic material across 46 sample village councils ( gram panchayats ) from 2013 to 2018, we draw attention to the non-homogeneity in the way political incentives of welfare provision are orientated towards different parties and individual stakeholders. In doing so, we traverse across multiple domains of political economic concepts, particularly that of partisan alignment, clientelism and patronage, and unpack the differentiated constellation of localised political incentives founded on a unique form of transactional paradigm called settings. We show how these on-ground transactions provide a multitude of political incentives for ruling/opposition political parties and panchayat functionaries, often going beyond conventional ethno-favouritism ideas of patronage and assuming a more personalised context. In turn, we also argue that the idea of settings is useful in providing a deeper understanding of local state-society relations and the political geography of welfare provisions in rural eastern India.

Local Politics and State-Society Relations: State Officials, Local Elites, and Political Networks in Provincial Urban Centres in the 1930s and 1940s in Turkey

The historiography of Turkey has until recently exhibited a solid state bias in the study of the formative years of the republic. Conversely, the intersection of the state with local power networks has been understudied. This paper studies the dynamics of local political networks as exemplified in the case study of Esat Adil Müstecaplıoğlu, an exceptional case of a local political broker with leftist leanings in a provincial urban setting in the 1930s. Focusing on a local feud he was involved in and its aftermath, the article studies the dynamic relations, simultaneously conciliatory and conflictual, between local power brokers and state elites within local politics; how networks of patronage operated and shaped the relation between state and society. In doing so, the article explores the state’s infrastructural limits to operate without the cooperation of local power brokers and considers the significance of these dynamics for the ongoing Kemalist nation-building programme. Lastly, it argues that in appearing co-optive towards local elites the state acknowledged its low political legitimacy and the weakness of its ‘cultural constituency’—educated middle classes.

Decolonising Clientelism: ‘Re-centring’ Analyses of Local State–Society Relations in South Africa

ABSTRACTConcepts such as democracy and accountability rely heavily for their normative framing on scholarship originating in Europe and America. While these theories of democracy are useful for setting up frameworks with which to engage, it is important to assess the actually existing practices of everyday state–society engagement in informal locations and economies of the global south. Practices of everyday democracy may differ in contexts such as South Africa’s and it is important to assess what this tells us about reconceptualising democratic theory in our region. While not uncritical of the power imbalances inherent in clientelism, this article attempts to provide a clear conceptual definition of clientelism and then investigates how this practice may fulfil democratic tasks such as increasing participation and accountability at the local level of governance. By reframing democratic expectations and unpacking where traditionally vilified practices such as clientelism may hold moments of democracy, the paper advances the idea that the study of democracy can be decolonised.

“Real, practical emancipation”?

Th is article explores the articulations of citizenship in subaltern politics in contemporary India. Departing from Karl Marx’s acknowledgment that, despite its limitations, political orders founded on the modern democratic conception of citizenship had propelled “real, practical emancipation,” I argue that citizenship has to be understood as simultaneously enabling and constraining radical political projects and popular social movements. I flesh out this argument through a detailed analysis of Adivasi mobilization in western Madhya Pradesh, India. My analysis shows how the Adivasi Mukti Sangathan, a local social movement in the region, democratized local state-society relations by appropriating basic democratic idioms and turning these against local state personnel and the violent extortion they engaged in. Drawing on James Holston’s work on “insurgent citizenship,” I argue that claims making around such democratic idioms inflected citizenship with new and potentially emancipatory meanings centered on local sovereignty and self-rule. I then detail how this mobilization provoked a substantial coercive backlash from the state and discuss the lessons that can be gleaned from this trajectory in terms of the possibilities and limitations that citizenship offers to progressive popular politics in India today.

Cosmopolitan Capitalism: Local State-Society Relations in China and India

This article examines different patterns of “cosmopolitan capitalism” in three paired localities in China and India: (1) Zhejiang/Gujarat, (2) Zhongguancun/Bangalore, and (3) Guangdong/Kerala. The paired cases illustrate the attentiveness of the local state to transnational society and present varied expressions of the local developmental impact of remittances and return migration. Analytically, this article departs from conventional usages of both state and society by focusing on the local state in combination with a less territorial conception of society. The rationale for this dual definitional stretch—both downwards (local state) and outwards (transnational society)—has an empirical basis. First, the local government represents the day-to-day point of contact with “the state” for most people. Second, limiting the scope of “society” to populations currently residing within national borders unnecessarily excludes temporary migrants and diasporic communities who continue to identify with a locality. Theoretically, this article extends Albert Hirschman's classic categorical troika of “exit, voice, and loyalty” to the literature on new transnationalism.

China's Vision for Developing Sichuan's Post-Earthquake Countryside: Turning Unruly Peasants into Grateful Urban Citizens

AbstractIn the aftermath of the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, government officials, scholars and outside observers eagerly hoped that the emergency relief and reconstruction process would bring about the emergence of civil society and increase grassroots democratic participation. Contrary to this optimistic assessment, this article contends that the local state used the opportunity of the disaster as an experimental laboratory to implement an array of already existing national development plans. The urgency with which the reconstruction was to be completed and the opportunities to meet national development targets as well as access reconstruction funds were too tempting to resist. However, the ham-fisted Leninist implementation style met with local resistance and has contributed to a significant deterioration in local state–society relations. The fact that many local residents continue to question why, despite the huge resources invested by the state in the reconstruction project, they have yet to see any improvement in their economic and overall living conditions points to a deficit of local participation and a breakdown in political communication and trust. By focusing on the different political economies of disaster reconstruction, this article attempts to illuminate the regime's vision for developing the countryside, rural politics, and state–society relations in China more broadly. Unless the state is able to incorporate local needs into its development plans, it will not win the trust and support of local residents, regardless of the amount of money it invests or the benevolence of its intentions.

‘Inclusive’ Neoliberalism, Local Governance Reforms and the Redeployment of State Power: The Case of the National Initiative for Human Development (INDH) in Morocco

This contribution uses the National Initiative for Human Development in Morocco as a case study to show the effects of ‘inclusive’ neoliberal local governance reforms on local state–society relations and the redeployment of state power. This initiative, launched by the king in 2005, is designed to improve socio-economic conditions in targeted poor areas through new participatory local governance mechanisms. The article argues, first, that these mechanisms in fact serve to strengthen the power of the appointed representatives of the Ministry of the Interior, especially at the province level, at the expense of local governments. Second, the findings show that by instrumentalizing local associations to access INDH funds, local councillors base their legitimacy increasingly on their renewed alliance with the king through the INDH and the clientelist relations it allows them to maintain, rather than on their status as political representatives. This contributes to the fragmentation and weakening of local (political) accountability.

The social relations of catfish production in Vietnam

The growth of intensive export-oriented Pangasius catfish production in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta is unparalleled in terms of rapidity and scale by any other agricultural sector, with production climbing from a low base to more than 1 million tons in a single decade. This paper examines the effects of this remarkable change on the rural class structure in locations where catfish farming has boomed, and analyses the role of local state-society relations in mediating outcomes resulting from the integration of local actors into the global value chain. We conclude that private economic activity is deeply embedded in informal relations with the state bureaucracy in Vietnam, with the result that the expansion of catfish aquaculture has generally acted to reproduce and entrench existing class relations rather leading to a radical reconfiguration of the rural class structure.

The onward sweep of social capital: causes and consequences for understanding cities, communities and urban movements

This article examines the way ‘social capital’ has been deployed by researchers and practitioners in the field of urban movements and community development. It reveals the powerful and in many ways effective role the concept is playing in framing the contemporary reconfigurations of local state‐society relations which impact especially on the trajectory of third or voluntary sector development. The article identifies the gaps and weaknesses the ‘social capital’ perspective responds to, thereby explaining why it looms so large within the urban development discourse. Its own blind spots and ambiguities, however, limit our understanding of contemporary urban change. By prioritizing specific forms of civic engagement (and neglecting others), the concept filters the contemporary reconfigurations in the relationship of civil society, state and market in a peculiar way, which is conducive to supporting the spread of market forces to areas so far beyond the reach of capital. By directing attention to the self‐activation potential of different communities, whether in the form of civic engagement of well‐to‐do volunteers or in the form of activation/reinsertion (into the low‐wage labour market) of the marginalized, this new discourse plays a crucial role not only in current efforts to unburden the local (welfare) state, but also in the expansion of market forces into new areas.L'article examine comment les chercheurs et spécialistes ont fait usage du ‘capital social’ dans le domaine des mouvements urbains et de l'évolution des communautés. Il dévoile le rô le dynamique et, par bien des aspects, efficace que ce concept joue en structurant les reconfigurations contemporaines des relations société‐gouvernement local, lesquelles influent notamment sur les tendances du secteur associatif ou du bénévolat. L'article identifie les lacunes et faiblesses que comble la perspective du ‘capital social’, expliquant ainsi les raisons de son omniprésence dans la rhétorique de l'urbanisme. Ses propres faiblesses et ambiguïtés limitent toutefois notre compréhension du changement urbain contemporain. En mettant en avant des formes spécifiques d'engagement civique (et en en négligeant d'autres), le concept dégage les reconfigurations modernes qui interviennent sur la relation entre société civile, É tat et marché, et ce d'une manière particulière qui contribue à la propagation des forces du marché dans des zones jusqu'alors inaccessibles au capital. En s'intéressant au potentiel d'auto‐activation de diverses communautés, que ce soit sous la forme d'un engagement civique de nantis volontaires ou de l'activation ou la réinsertion (sur le marché du travail des bas salaires) des marginaux, ce nouveau discours est essentiel, non seulement dans le cadre des efforts actuels visant à soulager l'É tat (providence) local, mais aussi dans l'expansion des forces du marché vers des zones nouvelles.

Caste, Class, and Clientelism: A Political Economy of Everyday Corruption in Rural North India

Corruption has reemerged as an important issue in research on geography and development, but there has been little research on the relationship between corruption and class reproduction in rural areas of poorer countries. This article presents insights into how low-level economic corruption actually works within institutions that are responsible for purchasing sugarcane in rural western Uttar Pradesh, India, and the role of this corruption in perpetuating material inequalities within rural society. The discussion is based on 12 months of intensive field research on the economic and social strategies of a dominant caste of rich farmers in Meerut District, western Uttar Pradesh. In this article, I note periodic rural protest against the government’s mismanagement of sugarcane marketing and corruption and describe everyday, disguised, and discrete forms of corruption that allow rich farmers to obtain privileged access to lucrative marketing opportunities. I also show how discourses surrounding corruption are politicized along the lines of caste and class. I conclude by relating my empirical material to debates on local state-society relations in India. I stress the need to understand corruption with reference to local political economy and the broader distribution of social and economic opportunities in rural society and point to future avenues for geographic research on corruption in the Indian countryside.