Author: cprindia

FIND OUT HOW THEIR GRASSROOTS MODEL OPERATES IN INDIA
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE

CPR-Namati Environmental Justice Program’s work on grassroots legal empowerment won the 2016 Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship. CPR researchers explain their work in India, and why this model makes a difference.

CPR and Namati’s work won the 2016 Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship. Can you tell us more about the work you do in India?

Since 2012, Namati and CPR have a unique partnership. Together we work to implement an action research project on legal empowerment for environmental justice in India. The project aims to improve the understanding of the institutional mechanisms and regulatory practices for protecting citizens from environmental impacts of industrialization and land use change.

We collect empirical data on how grievances or complaints are handled by specific agencies and what outcomes it leads to. The data from these cases helps us make evidence-based policy recommendations for institutional reform.

The legal empowerment method involves working through these cases with the involvement of those affected through trained community paralegals. Our trained paralegals work with the affected communities and the government, helping in crafting remedies that are meaningful.

Can you tell us more about the legal empowerment work on the ground, and what makes this model unique?

Namati practices the legal empowerment approach to solve some of the gravest justice problems of our time. In each of its programs, trained community grassroots legal advocates or paralegals, (also called grassroots legal advocates) treat their clients as empowered citizens rather than victims requiring an expert service. Instead of ‘I will solve this problem for you,’ Namati’s message is: ‘We will solve this together, and you will grow stronger in the process.’

Together, the paralegals and clients use different strategies and methods to determine the most effective ways to address justice challenges. In India, for example, we have worked on over a 100 cases related to pollution, loss of access to livelihood resources and damage to property. In all cases, the problems have existed for several years or have occurred repeatedly.

Paralegals trained by the program have been instrumental in bringing regulatory attention to these cases and assist in shaping effective remedies. Since we track every case systematically, we are able to use this information for systemic changes, like better policies for environmental regulation.

Plans for CPR-Namati, going forward?

Our plan over the next few years is that we hope to develop scalable models of participatory environmental regulation that focus on the experience of the environment by citizens and their resultant needs. We will work to implement these models in India and share what we have learned with legal empowerment practitioners around the world.

As a program that would like to respond creatively and productively to global environmental challenges, the goals for the Namati-CPR program are ambitious. There could not have been a better place than India to test this approach and learn from because India has a rich tradition of environmental values as well as a robust set of environmental laws. CPR’s long-standing research experience and engagement with national, regional and international policy is a unique asset to this program.

Which are the other countries in which you do similar work? And what areas do you span?

Namati and its partners currently work in eight countries: India, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Mozambique, Liberia and Uganda. We focus on enforcing environmental law, protecting community lands, and securing the rights to citizenship and effective healthcare. We also convene a global network of over 600 legal empowerment groups from 150 countries. The members are learning from one another and working together to make justice a reality for the billions of people who live outside the protection of the law.

To learn more about CPR-Namati Environmental Justice Program’s work, visit the dedicated page here.

Read Namati CEO Vivek Maru’s reflection on receiving the Skoll Award here.

FULL VIDEO OF THE WORKSHOP
POLITICS URBAN GOVERNANCE

Watch the full video (above) of the CPR- Centre for Science and Humanities (CSH) Workshop on ‘How Women Mobilise Women into Politics: Theory and Natural Experimental Evidence from Urban India’, featuring Tanushree Goyal.

How does women’s political entry affect citizen’s political involvement? Building on qualitative interviews and extending elite mobilisation theories to account for who conducts grass-roots mobilisation, Goyal argued that female politicians increase women’s numbers in party activist roles, and prospects of cheaply mobilising women provide a strategic incentive to do so. As a result, more women receive mobilising effort, such as door-to-door party contact, where women contest. Women’s entry in activist roles has downstream effects on the quality of mobilisation. When women enter into activist roles, where they were previously absent, they induce competition for these roles and in doing so raise the quality of activist pool. This affects the political involvement, that is, political knowledge and participation, of all citizens. Goyal provided evidence for this argument using original survey data from a natural experiment in Delhi’s Municipal Council, where randomly chosen electoral seats are reserved for women. By outlining how representation affects the calculus of mobilisation, this paper connects the literature on women’s political entry with mobilisation and political involvement.

This paper is part of an ongoing dissertation book project, provisionally titled, ‘The politics of representation: How female politicians make politics inclusive in India’, that examines the consequences of women’s entry through quotas in Delhi’s civic body. Drawing on a natural experiment, extensive fieldwork, interviews, and original survey, combined with insights from a new electoral polling-station level panel dataset, this book proposes to offer new theoretical insights and an empirical account of women’s agency in shaping urban politics and governance in India.

Tanushree Goyal is a third year PhD candidate at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, UK. She specialises in the political economy of development and comparative politics with a geographic focus on South Asia.

The presentation made by the speaker at the workshop can be accessed here. Find all the available videos of previous workshops, here.

FULL VIDEO OF THE WORKSHOP
POLITICS URBAN GOVERNANCE

Watch the full video (above) of the CPR- Centre for Science and Humanities (CSH) Workshop on ‘How Women Mobilise Women into Politics: Theory and Natural Experimental Evidence from Urban India’, featuring Tanushree Goyal.

How does women’s political entry affect citizen’s political involvement? Building on qualitative interviews and extending elite mobilisation theories to account for who conducts grass-roots mobilisation, Goyal argued that female politicians increase women’s numbers in party activist roles, and prospects of cheaply mobilising women provide a strategic incentive to do so. As a result, more women receive mobilising effort, such as door-to-door party contact, where women contest. Women’s entry in activist roles has downstream effects on the quality of mobilisation. When women enter into activist roles, where they were previously absent, they induce competition for these roles and in doing so raise the quality of activist pool. This affects the political involvement, that is, political knowledge and participation, of all citizens. Goyal provided evidence for this argument using original survey data from a natural experiment in Delhi’s Municipal Council, where randomly chosen electoral seats are reserved for women. By outlining how representation affects the calculus of mobilisation, this paper connects the literature on women’s political entry with mobilisation and political involvement.

This paper is part of an ongoing dissertation book project, provisionally titled, ‘The politics of representation: How female politicians make politics inclusive in India’, that examines the consequences of women’s entry through quotas in Delhi’s civic body. Drawing on a natural experiment, extensive fieldwork, interviews, and original survey, combined with insights from a new electoral polling-station level panel dataset, this book proposes to offer new theoretical insights and an empirical account of women’s agency in shaping urban politics and governance in India.

Tanushree Goyal is a third year PhD candidate at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, UK. She specialises in the political economy of development and comparative politics with a geographic focus on South Asia.

The presentation made by the speaker at the workshop can be accessed here. Find all the available videos of previous workshops, here.

FULL VIDEO OF PANEL DISCUSSION
URBAN ECONOMY

Watch the full video of the CPR – CSH (Centre de Sciences Humaines) panel discussion (above), featuring Amita Bhide, Kaveri Gill, Pankaj Kapoor, Anne Odic, Sanjeev Sanyal and Asim Waqif, which seeks to understand and explore the implications for the urban research agenda.

Even as India urbanises, there is relatively limited discussion on what this future urban will be. Will we follow well-trodden paths or will our dispersed settlement pattern, the advent of Industry 4.0 and new tools of governance lead us to a different destination? A panel of thought leaders from industry, civil society, academia and government brought their distinctive perspectives to answer such questions.

Amita Bhide is the Dean of the School of Habitat Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.

Kaveri Gill is Associate Professor, Department of International Relations and Governance Studies, Shiv Nadar University.

Pankaj Kapoor is founder and Managing Director of Liases Foras.

Anne Odic is the head of Local government and urban development division of the French Development Agency.

Sanjeev Sanyal is the Principal Economic Advisor, Ministry of Finance, Government of India.

Asim Waqif is an artist.

The question and answer session that followed can be accessed here. Find all available videos of previous workshops here.

FULL VIDEO OF WORKSHOP BY ANIRUDH KRISHNA
URBAN ECONOMY

Watch the full video of the CPR – CSH (Centre de Sciences Humaines) workshop (above), which seeks to investigate the condition of slums in the cities of Bengaluru, Jaipur and Patna.

Projections suggest that most of the global growth in population in the next few decades will be in urban centres in Asia and Africa. Most of these additional urban residents will be concentrated in slums. However, government documentation of slums is incomplete and unreliable. Slums and slum dwellers are systematically under-counted in India. It is necessary to employ creative methods to locate and sample these understudied populations. By using satellite image analysis and fieldwork to build a sample of 279 diverse slums in the 3 cities, and neighborhood surveys as well as individual interviews with 8,257 households, the presentation shows that living conditions vary along a wide-ranging continuum of wellbeing. Most variation in conditions is due to differences across rather than within slum neighborhoods.

Anirudh Krishna is the Edgar T Thompson Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at Duke University. His research investigates how poor communities and individuals in developing countries cope with the structural and personal constraints that result in poverty and powerlessness.

The question and answer session that followed can be accessed here. Find all available videos of previous workshops here.

FULL VIDEO OF THE WORKSHOP
URBAN ECONOMY

Watch the full video of the CPR-Centre for Science and Humanities (CSH) workshop (above) on ‘A Post-Post Apartheid Urban Praxis’ featuring Jhono Bennett.

South African cities are experiencing an unprecedented shift in the nature of growth and control as the country nears its fourth democratic election. The loss of majority political control held by the post-1994 ruling party to its opposition in three out of the five major metros, combined with the growing disillusion of the ‘rainbow nation’ articulated by student leaders in recent student protests, suggest a very different process of growth for a rapidly urbanising country.

Specifically, the manner in which those that practice and frame teaching and research within city-making spaces engage with each other will become increasingly fraught due to the growing contestation of the various urban identities; making it harder in the near future to meaningfully work across polarised sectors of the city to address emerging urban challenges.

The presentation shared a reflection on the speaker’s journey through this context and on their emerging modes of praxis.

Jhono Bennett is an architectural urbanist based in Johannesburg. He is a co-director and co-founder of 1to1 – Agency of Engagement, a design based social enterprise that has been developed to support the positive re-development of South African cities.

The question and answer session that followed can be accessed here. Find all the available videos of previous workshops, here.

FULL VIDEO OF WORKSHOP
URBANISATION

Watch the full video of the CPR – CSH (Centre de Sciences Humaines) workshop (above) on ‘Iron Cage meets Makeshift Shed – The ‘Jugaad’ State in Mumbai’, featuring Dr Shahana Chattaraj.

How does the state govern cities where much of the economy is informal, on the margins of state regulatory institutions? Chattaraj draws on field research in Mumbai between 2009-2016 to present an empirically-based conceptualisation of how the state works in cities like Mumbai, where ‘informality is a mode of urbanisation.’ She uses the popular Indian notion of ‘jugaad,’ which refers to makeshift adaptations, workarounds and improvisation under constraints, to describe the state in Mumbai. ‘Jugaad’ practices and strategies of governance – adaptive, flexible, negotiated and contingent – are routinely applied by state actors at different levels in Mumbai, in spaces ‘illegible’ to formal state institutions. ‘Jugaad’ governance practices are not arbitrary or merely corrupt, but rational, if ad hoc and extra-legal, adaptations around formal rules. These processes embed state actors in local power structures and crosscutting networks that span state, market and political organisations. While they enable the state to apprehend and partially incorporate the city’s informal spaces, they dissipate centralised state power and cohesiveness. The ‘jugaad’ state concept encapsulates how the formal and informal workings of the state interact and shape urban governance in largely informal cities. It draws attention to tensions and disjunctions within the state and in state-society relations in informal contexts.

The question and answer session that followed can be accessed here.

Find all available videos of previous workshops here.

FULL VIDEO OF THE WORKSHOP BY SHAMINDRA NATH ROY AND KANHU CHARAN PRADHAN
URBAN ECONOMY

Watch the full video of the CPR – CSH (Centre de Sciences Humaines) workshop (above), which seeks to estimate the number of census towns (CTs) that will be identified in 2019 for the 2021 census.

The presentation asks whether the large increase in the number of CTs from 2001 to 2011 census was a one-off phenomenon or part of a longer process of rural-urban transformation. Since such prognosis requires a detailed review of the census methodology of determining CTs, it also clarifies certain challenges that arise during such identification.

Along with this methodological review, the talk presents the regional distribution of CTs on the basis of the last two censuses and the upcoming predictions; and offers insight on their spatial characteristics in relation to larger cities, attempting to shed light on their economic characteristics in the broader context of rural-urban transformation. A better appreciation of this transformation is necessary to contextualise how well the policy framework is placed to manage and govern these areas, not only in the present but also in the future.

Shamindra Nath Roy and Kanhu Charan Pradhan are Senior Researchers at the Centre for Policy Research. Their current research includes patterns of rural-urban transformation, migration, labour force participation, and issues related to spatial segregation, urban informality and governance.

The question and answer session that followed can be accessed here. Find all available videos of previous workshops here.

FULL VIDEO OF WORKSHOP
URBAN ECONOMY

Watch the full video of the CPR-CSH (Centre de Sciences Humaines) workshop (above), featuring Eric Verdeil on ‘Reforming Failed Infrastructure, Struggling for the State: Lessons from Lebanon’.

The talk considers infrastructure as a site for the examination of urban governance in Lebanon, in a context of failure of the state to provide basic public services such as electricity and waste. The argument is threefold. First, public infrastructure is a site of political struggle. Political actors seek to make infrastructure serve certain political and social interests, demonstrating their belief that these state institutions and instruments produce a range of effects worth competing for. Second, the talk challenges the view that neoliberalism and sectarianism are radically narrowing and marginalising the state and its institutions. Third, despite failing to deliver the expected service outcomes, the complex assemblage of more-or-less reformed infrastructural policy instruments produces strong social effects in terms of wealth distribution. These instruments accentuate Lebanese society’s gaps and inequalities. This outcome is largely unintended, as is often the case with public policy instruments. It is a product of the work of state institutions, however, and not proof of their absence. To make this argument, this talk explores urban services in Beirut through the main types of instruments that successive governments and their advisers—commonly from the World Bank and other international organisations—have adopted for their reform: the geographic boundaries of the zones where urban services are organised; the services’ financing instruments, such as subsidies and pricing; and public-private partnerships.

Eric Verdeil is Professor of Geography and Urban Studies at Sciences Po, Paris and researcher at the Centre for International Research (CERI).

The question and answer session that followed can be accessed here.

Find all available videos of previous workshops here.

Watch the full video of the CPR – CSH (Centre de Sciences Humaines) workshop (above), which seeks to explore how Bhisti experience the state, its policies and politics of employment and challenge them, through the experiences of a Bhisti community leader.

This talk reflects on contested sanitary workers recruitment in the Jaipur Municipal Corporation, to explore a Muslim biraderi of Bhisti’s (water carriers) struggle to gain legal right to municipal job and the state’s attempt to ignore it. Despite reservation in municipal sanitary worker job, Bhisti recruitment has stopped since 1982. The community’s claims and attempts to assert and defend their rights have fallen on deaf ears, contested not only by different levels of bureaucracy and politicians but also by their Hindu counterparts, the Dalit sanitary workers.

The talk demonstrates how city politics and political infightings between councillors and party members variously impact the process of recruitment through the institutional and regulatory system, particularly contesting the applicants’ rights as citizens, and symbolically and materially marking their socio-economic deprivation.

Gayatri Jai Singh Rathore is an urban ethnographer. She holds a PhD in Political Science from SciencesPo/CERI. Her ethnographic work is concerned with examining the workings of waste disposal, materials recovery and recycling. Her current work focuses on circulation of ‘discarded’ objects and the specific notions of value attached to it.

The question and answer session that followed can be accessed here. Find all available videos of previous workshops here.