Embedding poor people’s voices in local governance: participation and political empowerment in India

Williams, Glyn (2016). Embedding poor people’s voices in local governance: participation and political empowerment in India. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Archive. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-852352

Poor people’s lack of voice and influence are globally recurring themes their own accounts of their poverty, and are indicative of their wider political disempowerment. This project evaluates attempts to tackle this core element of poverty through local governance reform. Its central research question is: to what extent do participatory initiatives within local governance enhance poor people’s opportunities for political empowerment?
Local governance reform has become a key site of development intervention, underpinned by an assumption that it will deliver positive feedback between popular participation, democratisation and poverty alleviation. The project critically analyses this assumption, focusing on two Indian States internationally recognised for innovations in local governance, West Bengal and Kerala. Primary data collection in each State centres on poor people’s own evaluations of participatory governance initiatives. It asks whether participatory initiatives create new public arenas where poor people do voice their concerns, whether they practically assist poor people in pressing their claims in these arenas and elsewhere, and whether participation actually challenges underlying political exclusion.

The project has been designed in collaboration with Indian partner institutions (CDS, Trivandrum, and CSSSC, Kolkata), and will engage with potential users - from local research participants to policy makers - from the outset.

Data description (abstract)

The project’s central research question was: to what extent do initiatives to make local governance more participatory enhance poor people's opportunities for political empowerment? Looking at four rural field sites in West Bengal and Kerala, India, it examines poor people's use of the formal opportunities they have for participation within the local state. This ‘invited participation’ is examined within the context of the social relations reproducing poverty and marginalisation, and informal structures of authority and power, both of which reshape governance reforms away from their intended practice.
The data available for archiving comes from two distinct groups of research participants; those implementing participatory initiatives within the local state (including civil servants, political leaders and community activists); and marginalised communities themselves. Both were subjects of in-depth qualitative interviews (in Bengali/Malayalam) with a field team that was located within the research areas for a period of 8 months. Transcription and translation is of mixed quality, so the research team has largely worked with the original audio voice recordings in West Bengal. Copies of the original audio files of all interviews have been archived with both project partner institutions (Centre for Development Studies, Trivandrum and Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta). The materials remain a rich source for the research team, but detached from their proper context their value to third-party researchers is uncertain.
In addition, a short questionnaire was conducted with every household in three wards of each of the four local councils (panchayats) of the study. This provides a micro-level snapshot of some basic poverty indicators within the four field sites, and was constructed to contextualise the qualitative field materials. This data could not be used to generalise about conditions at scales above the fieldsites themselves – for example, making comparisons at a District or State level about poverty, as this would have required a far larger stratified sampling procedure.

Qualitative interviews: Kerala – 21 interviews with social/political leaders and 50 interviews with marginalised communities were conducted in the Palakkad fieldsite, and a further 19 interviews with social/political leaders and 50 interviews with marginalised communities were conducted in the Wayanad field site. Good translations of the interviews (conducted in Malayalam) have been provided in almost all cases, and two examples are attached as Word files. Within West Bengal the equivalent numbers were 23 leadership and 53 community interviews for the first field site (in Dubrajpur Block), and 24 leadership and 50 community interviews for the second (in Mayreswar I Block). Interview transcription and translation here was of mixed quality due to the skills available within West Bengal (one example is attached) – and in writing papers from these materials, the team has largely worked with the original (Bengali) audio voice recordings.

Questionnaire Data: A copy of the questionnaire is attached (Houselisting Questionnaire 06-12-08.doc), and the data is provided in SPSS format split in to two SPSS files for each state (West Bengal Household; West Bengal Individual; Kerala Individual; Kerala Household). A short document with summary tables on giving a basic comparison between the four field sites is also attached (Tables of Voices of the Poor120810).

Data creators: