The use of standardised patients (SPs)—people recruited from the local community to present the same case to multiple providers in a blinded fashion—is increasingly used to measure the quality of care in low-income and middle-income countries. Encouraged by the growing interest in the SP method, and based on our experience of conducting SP studies, we present a conceptual framework for research designs and surveys that use this methodology. We accompany the conceptual framework with specific examples, drawn from our experience with SP studies in low-income and middle-income contexts, including China, India, Kenya and South Africa, to highlight the versatility of the method and illustrate the ongoing challenges. A toolkit and manual for implementing SP studies is included as a companion piece in the online supplement.
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India’s urban transition is salient to the growing emphasis on city responses to climate change. While projected to experience the largest global urban transition with significant infrastructure investment in the next few decades, the welfare of Indian cities remains poor, which complicates the implications for climate change mitigation and adaptation. This paper traces, synthesizes and characterizes the emerging literature on Indian urban climate debates. It discusses the arc of urban climate efforts, from an initial emphasis on climate vulnerabilities and risks, broadening over time to include climate mitigation. The paper examines the governance forms and political motivations with which such actions are pursued in cities and finds three overarching characteristics: the use of local development priorities as an entry point to climate mitigation and adaptation; the role of nonstate actors in promoting climate‐relevant outcomes; and the proclivity for discrete project‐based activities. The paper suggests that while a range of Indian cities are beginning to consider climate concerns, a larger strategic understanding of the interaction between climate and development priorities, across policy and governance levels, is yet to be developed. The future trajectory of urban India’s responses to climate change will be shaped by the institutional prioritising, linking and integrating of urgent local development and mitigation and adaptation goals.
Suggested Citation:
Khosla, Radhika, and Ankit Bhardwaj. 2018. “Urbanization in the time of climate change: Examining the response of Indian cities.” WIREs Climate Change 560.
A read only version of the article can be accessed here: https://rdcu.be/bb2DV
Influence of wealth on electoral participation, has been of interest both at theoretical and empirical levels for researchers across many electoral democracies in the world. India remains an exception to the established narrative on a direct relation between economic and social wellbeing and political participation. Using aggregated constituency level data and survey techniques, scholars have identified several intriguing patterns in the Indian electoral behaviours particularly in urban settings.
Our work adds nuance to these discussions based on insights gained from a unique database – which matches property tax categories and polling stations in Delhi. Our research, using the Delhi case shows that neighbourhoods have a significant influence on voting behaviours of both the rich and the poor in urban areas. We also show that poor datasets have been thwarting effective policymaking and research in Indian cities and creative use of available datasets can lead to significant leaps in policy imagination.
Methodologically, this approach of using urban property tax as proxy for wealth, we argue opens up new dimensions – particularly, the significant influence that neighbourhoods exert on electoral behaviour on both rich and the poor.
While the outcomes of the Lok Sabha and the state assembly elections have been well documented and analysed, little is known about the electoral geography in urban areas. In discussing the conflicting interests of local politics and urban development, this article places the definition and understanding of what is “urban” in the context of the 74th constitutional amendment, and also looks at the expectations from and the progress on the reforms agenda of the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission. Further, the article addresses the high economic stakes and challenges involved in metro governance, while arguing that these cannot be dealt with under the general rubric of Union-State-Municipality. International experience is relevant in this regard not for the structural models followed, but because unlike in India, the subject of urban governance in most cities around the world has been a matter of serious debate and action.
The expansion in the geographical distribution of vector-borne diseases is a much emphasized consequence of climate change, as are the consequences of urbanization for diseases that are already endemic, which may be even more important for public health. In this paper, we focus on dengue, the most widespread urban vector-borne disease. Largely urban with a tropical/subtropical distribution and vectored by a domesticated mosquito, Aedes aegypti, dengue poses a serious public health threat. Temperature plays a determinant role in dengue epidemic potential, affecting crucial parts of the mosquito and viral life cycles. The urban predilection of the mosquito species will further exacerbate the impact of global temperature change because of the urban heat island effect. Even within a city, temperatures can vary by 10 °C according to urban land use, and diurnal temperature range (DTR) can be even greater. DTR has been shown to contribute significantly to dengue epidemic potential. Unraveling the importance of within-city temperature is as important for dengue as for the negative health consequences of high temperatures that have thus far been emphasized, for example, pollution and heat stroke. Urban and landscape planning designed to mitigate the non-infectious negative effects of temperature should additionally focus on dengue, which is currently spreading worldwide with no signs of respite.
This presents some of the early findings from a study on the policy questions around India’s urban drinking water supply and documents the significant central government efforts, inspite of which the situation today is far from satisfactory. The paper analyses the policy framework under the JNNURM for urban reform and its impact on the urban drinking water sector. Although currently there seems to be a realization of the challenges that face the sector, and some consensus on the key elements of reform at the policy level, much of this reform is yet to be implemented. The paper asks why implementation is lagging and poses that a strong research agenda to understand the key challenges posed by the various cities in implementation of reforms needs to be supported if the drinking water sector is to improved to better serve citizens in the future.
This paper examines Delhi’s first slum in situ redevelopment project under public-private partnership undertaken by the Delhi Development Authority in Kathputli Colony. At a time where the principle of community participation is recognised in policy documents, this research focuses on its implementation in this project, at the ground level, highlighting the challenges of participation in the context of a settlement with multiple communities. A preliminary assessment raises a series of questions regarding the management of such redevelopment projects. It further illustrates core issues for participation and mobilisation, including the role of non-governmental organisations and community-based organisations.
This paper, and the special issue it introduces, explores whether, and how, the rise of the regulatory state of the South, and its implications for processes of governance, are distinct from cases in the North. With the exception of a small but growing body of work on Latin America, most work on the regulatory state deals with the US or Europe, or takes a relatively undifferentiated “legal transplant” approach to the developing world. We use the term “the South” to invoke shared histories of many countries, rather than as a geographic delimiter, even while acknowledging continued and growing diversity among these countries, particularly in their engagement with globalization.
We suggest that three aspects of this common context are important in characterizing the rise of the regulatory state of the South. The first contextual element is the presence of powerful external pressures, especially from international financial institutions, to adopt the institutional innovation of regulatory agencies in infrastructure sectors. The result is often an incomplete engagement with and insufficient embedding of regulatory agencies within local political and institutional context. A second is the greater intensity of redistributive politics in settings where infrastructure services are of extremely poor quality and often non-existent. The resultant politics of distribution draws in other actors, such as the courts and civil society; regulation is too important to be left to the regulators. The third theme is that of limited state capacity, which we suggest has both “thin” and “thick” dimensions. Thin state capacity issues include prosaic concerns of budget, personnel and training; thick issues address the growing pressures on the state to manage multiple forms of engagement with diverse stakeholders in order to balance competing concerns of growth, efficiency and redistribution.
These three themes provide a framework for this special issue, and for the case studies that follow. We focus on regulatory agencies in infrastructure sectors (water, electricity and telecoms) as a particular expression of the regulatory state, though we acknowledge that the two are by no means synonymous. The case studies are drawn from India, Colombia, Brazil, and the Philippines, and engage with one or more of these contextual elements. The intent is to draw out common themes that characterize a “regulatory state of the South,” while remaining sensitive to the variations in level of economic development and political institutional contexts within “the South.”
Navroz K. Dubash and Bronwen Morgan, Understanding the rise of the regulatory state of the South, Regulation & Governance 6(3): 261-281 (2012).
In this piece, we argue that the electoral performance of the BJP, and the popularity of Narendra Modi, has significantly altered the dynamic of regional party politics in India. The BJP’s undiluted power at the Centre has created the political context for greater centralization of power. This in turn has generated greater distinctions between regional and national politics. The popularity of Prime Minister Modi combined with his party’s ideological project generates a deeply centralized national politics that can be easily distinguished from regional politics for the voter. This increasingly distinct form of national politics weakens the role of regional parties in national politics, both in electoral terms and in bargaining power, as regional parties rarely have well-defined, credible national policy platforms in India. However, it does, for the moment, appear to strengthen the electoral position of regional parties at the state level.
This article seeks to understand the contrarian impulses embedded in the historic Supreme Court judgement in the ‘battle for Niyamgiri’ that resulted in tribal gram sabhas rejecting the bauxite mining proposal of the Odisha state government and transnational corporation, Vedanta. It proposes that the importance of the Niyamgiri case lies in the legal representation of indigeneity that emerges as a counterpoint to automatic assumptions of developmentalism and cultural homogeneity. However, rather than seeing this as an epistemic or discursive break in the practice of law, it proposes that we see the case ‘jurisdictionally’, as a practice of representation that is enacted through technologies and devices of law. It is important to understand that constitutive actors—lawyers, judges, ministers, experts, tribals—within specific jurisdictional spaces can change the prudence and diction in law, beyond the internal necessity of rules underwritten by tradition or dominant discourse. It is through this lens that the article sees the Niyamgiri story as inaugurating a particular form of lawful relations for indigeneity—one that becomes a part of case law history and precedent. No matter how tenuous, precedents such as Niyamgiri underwrite the prospect of future iterations of indigeneity.
