Moving the state: The politics of democratic decentralization in Kerala, South Africa, and Porto Alegre

Politics and Society

Volumn 29, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 131-163

  Heller, Patrick ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0035578579     PISSN: 00323292     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0032329201029001006     Document Type: Review

References (74)

1. For a comparative discussion of the role of labor movements in the democratization process in South Africa and Brazil, see Gay W. Seidman, Manufacturing Militance: Workers' Movements in Brazil and South Africa, 1970-1985 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). For a discussion of the Kerala case, see Patrick Heller, The Labor of Development: Workers in the Transformation of Capitalism in Kerala, India (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).
2. For a comparative discussion of the role of labor movements in the democratization process in South Africa and Brazil, see Gay W. Seidman, Manufacturing Militance: Workers' Movements in Brazil and South Africa, 1970-1985 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). For a discussion of the Kerala case, see Patrick Heller, The Labor of Development: Workers in the Transformation of Capitalism in Kerala, India (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).
3. For Brazil, see Kurt Weyland, Democracy without Equity: Failures of Reform in Brazil (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996). For South Africa, see Hein Marais, South Africa: Limits to Change (London: Zed Books, 1998).
4. For Brazil, see Kurt Weyland, Democracy without Equity: Failures of Reform in Brazil (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996). For South Africa, see Hein Marais, South Africa: Limits to Change (London: Zed Books, 1998).
5. For a particularly illuminating case study, see James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: "Development," Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
6. Even if the regimes in question are not commensurate as political units, the fact that each is, within its own context, empowered to effect the reform of local government, and in particular to promote greater participation in the process of allocating resources, serves as the basis for comparison. In South Africa, the recent transformation of the nation-state and the political imperative of undoing the spatial and social segregation of apartheid has of course made national government and legislation the critical agent of local government reform. In India, as E.M.S. Namboodiripad famously remarked, since Independence, relations between the center and the states have been governed by democracy, but the relations between the states and local government have been governed by bureaucracy. This however changed with the passage in 1993 of the Seventy-third and Seventy-fourth Amendments to the Constitution that granted local governments new democratic powers but left most of its developmental functions to the discretion of state governments. In Brazil, federalism and a long history of party fragmentation and oligarchical politics have made municipalities critical sites of interest aggregation and patronage. In the postauthoritarian period, the Partido dos Trabalhadores's (PT) efforts to build participatory democracy have thus focused on cities. Porto Alegre represents only one, but by far the most carefully documented, of successful PT-led initiatives to institute "popular budgeting."
7. Miguel Centeno, Democracy within Reason: Technocratic Revolution in Mexico (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 1997).
8. Pranab Bardhan, "The State against Society: The Great Divide in Indian Social Science Discourse," in Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, eds., Nationalism, Democracy and Development (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 184-95.
9. James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
10. Gerd Schonwalder, "New Democratic Spaces at the Grassroots? Popular Participation in Latin American Local Governments," Development and Change 28, (1997): 757.
11. James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine, 194.
12. Jonathan Fox, "How Does Political Society Thicken?: The Political Construction of Social Capital in Mexico," in Peter Evans, ed., State-Society Synergy: Government and Social Capital in Development (Berkeley, CA: International and Area Studies, 1996), 119-49.
13. Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers, "Secondary Associations and Democratic Governance," in Erik O. Wright, ed., Association and Democracy (London: Verso, 1995).
14. Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright, "Deepening Democracy: Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance," this issue.
15. Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
16. Mark Swilling and Laurence Boya, "Local Governance in Transition," in Patrick Fitzgerald, Anne McLennan, and Barry Munslow, eds., Managing Sustainable Development in South Africa (Cape Town, South Africa: Oxford University Press, 1997), 165-91.
17. Rebecca Abers, "From Ideas to Practice: The Partido dos Trabalhadores and Participatory Governance in Brazil," Latin American Perspectives 23, no. 4 (1996): 39.
18. Ibid., 45.
19. Gianpaolo Baiocchi, "Participation, Activism, and Politics: The Porto Alegre Experiment and Deliberative Democratic Theory," this issue.
20. Gianpaolo Baiocchi, "Decentralization of Government in Brazil - Perils and Prospects" (paper presented at the International Conference on Democratic Decentralisation, Thiruvananthapuram, 23-27 May 2000).
21. For the most authoritative account of the Campaign presented by the key architect and member-in charge of decentralization in the Planning Board, see Thomas Isaac, Local Democracy and Development: People's Campaign for Decentralised Planning (New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2000).
22. Thomas Isaac, Local Democracy and Development, chap. 1.
23. There are 990 village Panchayats and fifty-eight municipalities in Kerala with an average population of 29,580. Each Panchayat has ten to twelve wards, with a single councilor for each ward elected on a first-past-the-post system.
24. Government of Kerala, People's Planning: Towards a Handbook (Thiruvananthapuram: Kerala State Planning Board, 1999), 20.
25. Ibid., 23.
26. See T. N. Seema and Vanitha Mukherjee, "Gender Governance and Citizenship in Decentralised Planning" (paper presented at the International Conference on Democratic Decentralisation, Thiruvananthapuram, 23-27 May 2000).
27. See B. Manjula, "Voices from the Spiral of Silence: A Case Study of Samatha Self Help Groups of Ulloor" (paper presented at the International Conference on Democratic Decentralisation, Thiruvananthapuram, 23-27 May 2000).
28. The head of an important nongovernmental organization (NGO) coalition did note that while many NGOs have expressed lukewarm support for the Campaign, they have played an active role at the local level, particularly in supplying expertise to task forces (interview, T. A. Varghese, Inter-Cooperation, Trivandurm, 16 August 1999).
29. K. N. Harilal and Mariamma Sanu George, "Prioritisation in Local-level Planning: The Kerala Experience" (paper presented at the International Conference on Democratic Decentralisation, Thiruvananthapuram, 23-27 May 2000), 6-7.
30. Mark Swilling and Laurence Boya, "Local Governance in Transition," 193. The strength of the civic movement is most dramatically reflected in the wide-based support for rent and service boycotts. In Soweto, for example, 80 percent of formal rent-paying households withheld payments for four years (ibid., 181).
31. Mark Swilling and Laurence Boya, "Local Governance in Transition," 193. The strength of the civic movement is most dramatically reflected in the wide-based support for rent and service boycotts. In Soweto, for example, 80 percent of formal rent-paying households withheld payments for four years (ibid., 181).
32. Ibid., 174.
33. Doug Hindson and Bongani Ngqulunga, "Local Development Strategy in Durban" (paper presented at the International Conference on Democratic Decentralization, Thiruvananthapuram, 23-27 May 2000).
34. Jo Beall, Owen Crankshaw, and Susan Parnell, "Local Government, Poverty Reduction and Inequality in Johannesburg," Environment and Urbanization 12, no. 1 (April 2000): 118.
35. Most notably, see Government of South Africa, Provincial Affairs and Constitutional Development, White Paper on Local Government (Pretoria: 1998).
36. See references below as well as Patrick Bond, "Privatisation, Participation and Protest in the Restructuring of Municipal Services," Urban Forum 9, no. 1 (1998): 37-75; Caroline Kihato, "Critical Perspectives on Decentralization in South Africa" (paper presented at the International Conference on Democratic Decentralization, Thiruvananthapuram, 23-27 May 2000).
37. See references below as well as Patrick Bond, "Privatisation, Participation and Protest in the Restructuring of Municipal Services," Urban Forum 9, no. 1 (1998): 37-75; Caroline Kihato, "Critical Perspectives on Decentralization in South Africa" (paper presented at the International Conference on Democratic Decentralization, Thiruvananthapuram, 23-27 May 2000).
38. Lindsay Bremner, "Participatory Planning: Models of Urban Governance: Porto Alegre and Greater Johannesburg," Urban Forum 9, no. 1 (1998): 117.
39. Ibid., 118.
40. Interviews conducted for the Centre for Policy Studies by the author and Libhongo Ntlokonkulu with fifteen branch-level officials between 1 May and 22 August 2000.
41. Mark Swilling, as quoted in Richard Tomlinson, "Ten Years in the Making: A History of the Evolution of Metropolitan Government in Johannesburg," Urban Forum 10, no. 1 (1999): 27.
42. Ebrahim-Khalil Hassen, "Moving Targets: Public Sector Transformation," Indicator 17, no. 1 (2000): 20-26.
43. Richard Tomlinson, "Ten Years in the Making: A History of the Evolution of Metropolitan Government in Johannesburg."
44. Doug Hindson and Bongani Ngqulunga, "Local Development Strategy in Durban."
45. Nanine Kruger, typescript report prepared for the Centre for Community and Labor Studies (Durban, South Africa: 1999).
46. See Urban Sector Network, Case Study on Community Participation in Local Government in South Africa (1999). In rural areas, Integrated Development Plans (IDPs) have generally failed to materialize, either because of completely inadequate local capacities and/or because of the bifurcated nature of rural power in which the representative authority of elected officials is subordinated to the official as well as unofficial powers of so-called traditional chiefs.
47. Beall et al., "Local Government, Poverty Reduction and Inequality in Johannesburg," 120.
48. David Hemson, "Beyond BOTT? Policy Perspectives in Water Delivery" (report on the NGOs and the BOTT Program in the Eastern Cape and Kwa-Zulu Natal prepared for the Rural Development Sector Network, February 1999).
49. Shamin Meer, "The Demobilisation of Civil Society: Struggling with New Questions," Development Update 3, no. 1 (October 1999), 112.
50. Firoz Khan, "A Commentary on Dark Roast Occasional Paper No 1: 'Developmenal Local Government: The Second Wave of Post-Apartheid Urban Reconstruction'" (Cape Town, South Africa: Isandla Institute, 1998).
51. David Hemson, "Beyond BOTT? Policy Perspectives in Water Delivery."
52. Firoz Khan, "A Commentary," 3.
53. Steven Friedman, "An End in Itself: Democracy and the Building of Post-Apartheid South Africa" (unpublished manuscript, Centre for Policy Studies, Johannesburg, 2000).
54. Peter Evans, "Looking for Agents of Urban Livability in a Globalized Political Economy," in Peter Evans, ed., Livable Cities? The Politics of Urban Livelihood and Sustainability (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming).
55. Peter Evans, "Government Action, Social Capital and Development: Reviewing the Evidence on Synergy," World Development 24, no. 6 (1996): 1119-32.
56. Olle Tornquist distinguishes between "state-modernizers" and "popular developmentalists," Tornquist, "Making Democratisation Work: From Civil Society and Social Capital to Political Inclusion and Politicisation: Theoretical Reflections on Concrete Cases in Indonesia, Kerala, and the Philippines," Research Programme on Popular Movements, Development and Democratisation, University of Oslo, (March 1997). Marked as they are by cross-cutting alignments and constant repositioning, the exact boundaries of such factional groupings are difficult to identify. The division do however roughly parallel the oft-noted, if often exaggerated, difference between old and new social movements. The corporatist faction (known locally as the CITU faction, after the CPM labor federation) has its power base in the larger industrial and public employees unions and subscribes to the view that popular struggles can only be advanced through the party's disciplined organizational structures. The redistributive thrust of class struggle remains primary, with the state viewed as the principle locus of power, and state capture as the principle strategic objective. The social movement faction retains the concern for redistributive struggles, but specifically recognizes other sources of domination, including gender and bureaucratic power. The significance of democracy is located less in the concept of working class power and its organizational expressions (party and state), than in the nurturing of democratic practices, both through institutional reform (making the state more responsive) and nurturing democratic capacities (participation and empowerment at all levels of governance).
57. Patrick Heller, "Degrees of Democracy: Some Comparative Lessons from India," World Politics, 52 (July 2000) 484-519.
58. For an extended discussion, see Olle Tornquist, "Of New Popular Politics of Development: The Kerala Experience," in Govindan Parayil, ed., The Kerala Model (London: Zed Books, 2000).
59. M.P. Parameswaran, a prominent KSSP leader, notes that as early as 1972, the KSSP was promoting the concept of sustainable development well before it became fashionable in development circles (personal communication, May 23, 2000, Thiruvananthapuram).
60. For a detailed discussion, see Thomas Isaac, Local Democracy and Development, Chap. 4.
61. If the Campaign has produced significant complementarities, there have also been cases of disengagement. Many NGOs perceive the campaign as a largely political exercise and have kept their distance. Party-based mass organizations have been conspicuous by their inactivity. In the case of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) organizations, this reflects the unresolved divisions between the corporatist and social movement factions, a division that appears to be much less pronounced in Porto Alegre.
62. Rebecca Abers, "From Ideas to Practice," 37.
63. Patricia Hipsher, "Democratic Transitions as Protest Cycles: Social Movement Dynamics in Democratizing Latin America," in Sidney Tarrow and David Meyer, eds., The Social Movement Society (New York: Rowan & Littlefield, 1998), 152-72.
64. "The conception which prevailed during the first year of the Workers Party administration was deeply influenced by the idea that politics always involves the representation of particular interests and that the Workers Party should only change which particular interests prevailed within the local administration," Leonardo Avritzer, "Public Deliberation at the Local Level: Participatory Budgeting in Brazil" (paper presented at the Experiments in Deliberative Democracy Conference, Madison, WI, January 2000), 16.
65. Gianpaolo Baiocchi's article in this issue of Politics & Society, 42-71.
66. Ibid.
67. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, "Participatory Budgeting in Porto Alegre: Toward a Redistributive Democracy," Politics & Society 26, no. 4 (December 1998): 479, 497.
68. As Friedman has pointed out, apartheid's exclusionary structures precluded building civil society and emphasized instead struggles for capturing state power. See Steven Friedman, "Bonaparte at the Barricades: The Colonisation of Civil Society," Theoria (May 1992).
69. The contrast with the labor movement is telling. Well before the African National Congress (ANC) asserted its hegemony over the national movement, unions had established powerful strongholds built largely on the strength of shop-floor democracy. As membership organizations with formal structures of representation, unions thus had an independent and sustainable organizational base, which explains the far more autonomous position the labor movement continues to enjoy.
70. The ANC's hegemonizing impulse is reflected in its equation of state power with people's power and its strategy of subordinating independent arenas of popular action to political control. A leading young party theorist has thus recently deplored the "dichotomy between political and civic matters" that is implicit in the very existence of South African National Civic Organisation (SANCO), and has called for ANC branch committees to supplant SANCO by engaging directly in civic activities. See David Makura, "The MDM, Civil Society and Social Transformation," Umrabulo, no. 7 (1999): 17.
71. President Mbeki's much publicized support for the "dissident" view on AIDS (which rejects the link between HIV and AIDS) and the government's refusal to provide antiretroviral drugs (including for rape victims and HIV-positive pregnant women) has been maintained in the face of vociferous criticism from health professionals, AIDS activists, the media, and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU).
72. These tendencies are reflected in a number of recent developments. Internally, the power and scope of the President's office has increased dramatically under Mbeki. Provincial premiers and Megacity mayors are now directly appointed by the ANC high command. Recent reforms in the demarcation of local government - which were presented as a strictly administrative process of rationalization - have dissolved local city councils in favor of unicity structures and much more centralized forms of representation. In the run-up to last year's local government elections, the ANC has exercised even tighter control over the selection of candidates by providing central oversight of local nominations and sidelining alliance partners (SANCO and COSATU). The standard rationale for this it that it allows the ANC to weed out "populist" and "opportunist" party elements and select more professional and capable candidates.
73. Steven Friedman, "An End in Itself," 17.
74. See Alan Mabin and S. Parnell, "Rethinking Urban South Africa," Journal of Southern African Studies 21, (1995): 39-62.