Clean drinking water, good roads, health care, and education: these are among the public goods and services required to fulfill basic human needs and foster development. Such goods and services are not only integral to human welfare, but are also important indicators of governmental and institutional performance. Yet so-called "public" goods are rarely purely public or equally available to all. Rather they are the subjects of struggle among different groups laying claim to limited public resources. This project examines the variation in access to publicly provided goods and services at the local level in rural India and, in particular, the different paths poor people and communities pursue to obtain such goods. Why do some villages enjoy better roads and water supply or easier access to health and education facilities than other, similar villages? Within villages, why are some groups and individuals more likely than others to receive services? Why, in other words, are some places and people better able to access and make effective demands upon the state?
India, the world's largest democracy and a decentralized system, is an ideal setting in which to explore these questions. In India, as in other diverse societies, access to public resources is often drawn along class, caste, ethnic, religious, and gender lines, and may be best understood as a matter of who can extract them from the political system. The politics of public goods in India largely take place at the local level, where access is mediated by a wide range of institutions, both formal and informal, public and private. Elected village councils co-exist with a wide range of informal and non-state institutions including "traditional" village councils, caste associations, self-help groups, business associations, and non-governmental organizations. Together these formal and informal institutions comprise a complex institutional and governance environment. How do people navigate this landscape to access the state and public resources?
To answer this question, this project uses mixed methods, applying both statistical and case study analysis in villages across four Indian states: Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh in the north, and Tamil Nadu and Kerala in the south. These states reflect important regional differences between northern (less developed) and southern (more developed) India, as well as state-level differences in the depth of fiscal and political decentralization. To allow for both theory building and testing, village and household level surveys and case studies including semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions are conducted.
This dissertation provides insight into the optimal design of programs to improve service delivery by capturing a bottom-up view of how public goods reach the people who need them and the various channels through which people seek and access state services. A central goal is to develop a broader conceptualization of local governance that considers the interaction of both formal and informal institutions in structuring access to public resources. The findings of this project will be of interest in India and beyond, particularly in the developing world, where the provision of essential public goods remains a major challenge to development and where formal state agencies co-exist with myriad informal governance structures. Finally, the project will engage scholars and colleagues in India in developing and disseminating the findings of the study, and will offer training opportunities to local students in carrying out the fieldwork.
