ساخت دموکراسی محلی : بررسی تاثیر تمرکز زدایی در کرالا، هند

Historically, local rural governments in India have enjoyed very limited powers and citizens have been afforded very few opportunities to shape local development. In 1996, the state government of Kerala initiated the “People’s Campaign for Decentralized Planning” devolving new authority and resources to panchayats and mandating structures and processes designed to maximize the direct involvement of citizens in planning and budgeting. In both its scope and design, these reforms represent the most ambitious effort to build local institutions of participatory democratic governance ever undertaken in the subcontinent. This paper provides a detailed evaluation and analysis of the formative period of the reforms based on extensive survey data collected in 2002 from a sample of 72 randomly selected panchayats.

Historically, local rural governments in India have enjoyed very limited powers and citizens have been afforded very few opportunities to shape local development. The 73rd Constitutional amendment passed in 1993 aimed to remedy this democratic deficit by granting local rural governments new powers and making them more accountable to citizens. Implementation was however left to the states, and as is always the case in India, inter-state variation has been pronounced. The most determined effort at democratic decentralization has been in the state of Kerala. In 1996, a coalition of left parties led by the Communist Party of India—Marxist (CPI(M)) returned to power and immediately fulfilled one of its most important campaign pledges by launching the “People’s Campaign for Decentralized Planning.” All 1 214 local governments in Kerala—municipalities and the three rural tiers of district, block, and gram panchayats—were given new functions and powers of decision making, and were granted discretionary budgeting authority over 35–40% of the state’s developmental expenditures. In addition to devolving resources, state officials sought to directly promote participatory democracy by mandating structures and processes designed to maximize the direct involvement of citizens in planning and budgeting. In both its scope and design, the campaign represents the most ambitious and concerted state-led effort to build local institutions of participatory democratic governance ever undertaken in the subcontinent. This paper provides a detailed evaluation and analysis of the first four years of decentralization based on extensive records and survey data collected in 2002 from a sample of 72 randomly selected panchayats.1

In both scale and design, the decentralization reforms that were introduced in Kerala in 1996 represent an ambitious effort to build local democracy. The impact of the reforms carries important lessons for our understanding of decentralization, and even more importantly of democratic deepening. The research reported here aimed to provide broad and robust measures of the campaign’s effect by collecting data directly from a sample of 72 panchayats and interviews with 858 key respondents. Our most important finding can be simply stated: the campaign has created structures of participatory governance where none existed before. The simple fact that local governments in Kerala now have functions and resources they did not have in the recent past represents a significant transformation. Until the passage of the 73rd and 74th constitutional amendments, local government in India (with a few notable exceptions) was little more than an empty institutional shell serving primarily as an extension of the planning and bureaucratic powers of states. Whatever authority local governments had was generally monopolized by local elites. Because of its history of land reform and social movements, Kerala departed somewhat from this pattern of local elite dominance, but panchayats have nonetheless historically been very weak and developmentally ineffective. That the campaign has irreversibly changed the importance of local government in Kerala is beyond doubt. Not only have resources been devolved—and we know this both from official sources, from direct data collected from our sample panchayats and from the almost unanimous opinions of our respondents—but new institutions have been built, new processes of local decision making have been created and new channels of participation have been opened up. In sum, new loci of governance and new spaces of citizenship now mark Kerala’s political and development landscape. One of the most respected and skeptical commentators on the campaign, Kannan, has maybe offered one of the most succinct assessments: the campaign has not only created a “public platform for a vigilant civil society,” but has also ensured an “enabling environment for development” (Kannan & Pillai, 2004, p. 39).