Harry Blair

Yale University | YU · South Asian Studies Center

Since its beginning in Brazil in 1989, participatory budgeting (PB) has spread worldwide to several thousand local governmental units (LGUs) in all continents, celebrated for its success in combining citizen involvement and state accountability in delivering public services. While PB has been adopted in most places by individual LGUs on their own i...

A state’s accountability to its citizens for public service delivery constitutes a central component of the democratic polity. But how to assure this accountability? The answer lies in the linkage between citizens and some combination of elected political leaders and those they direct to provide the services. In India over recent decades, a host of...

Part I of this article traced the experience of India’s Bihar state as it shifted in the last decade of the twentieth century from a region dominated by landowning upper castes and plagued by entrenched poverty to one led by newly emergent middle castes. In a two-step process, these groups first attained a significant dignity and self-respect and t...

Down into the last decades of the twentieth century, Bihar remained India's poorest state and one under the domination of its landowning upper castes – a well-nigh hopeless case for development in the view of most outside observers. But in the 1990s, a fresh leader gained a new dignity for the Backward castes, even as the state's poverty and corrup...

This article addresses the relationship between democracy, equity and common property resource management in South Asia, both at the national and at the local level. Its substantive focus will be largely on forests, and its geographical concentration mostly on India, although other sectors (primarily water) and areas (Nepal and Bangladesh) will als...

This paper focuses on crafting a workable strategy for civil society advocacy in rural Bangladesh that can adequately represent the interests of the poorest groups. It shows how the poor and the poorest rely on patron–client ties, to avoid destitution and to survive, respectively, while arguing that the poor need to move beyond these inherently dis...

Democracy assistance programmes have always been notoriously difficult to measure in terms of outcome, but the need to show their impact (or lack of it) remains critical. This article represents part of a continuing endeavour to develop a tool for measuring civil society programme impact in the form of an advocacy scale encompassing democracy's cri...

In their book Administrative Decentralization: Strategies for Developing Countries, John Cohen and Steven Peterson construct a model they call ‘institutional pluralism’, which they contend is superior to more traditional modes of decentralization. It is characterized chiefly by multiple channels of service provision, thus inducing accountability in...

Democratic local governance (DLG), now a major subtheme within the overall context of democratic development, promises that government at the local level can become more responsive to citizen desires and more effective in service delivery. Based on a six-country study sponsored by USAID (Bolivia, Honduras, India, Mali, the Philippines and Ukraine),...

As a part of the increasingly large profile assumed by democracy within the international donor com-munity in recent years, decentralization has taken on significant importance as a strategy. Bringing the two together has produced democratic decentralization or democratic local governance (DLG) as it is labeled in this report. DLG may be defined as...

Of the three strategies available for managing common property resources (CPR)—centralized control, privatization and local management—this essay focuses on the last, which has proven quite effective in various settings throughout the Third World, with the key to success being local ability to control access to the resource. The major factors at is...

Over the last decade, forestry has become increasingly more involved with and integrated into the more general rural development (RD) process in the Third World. In doing so, forestry joins an activity that has itself been developing and maturing for some three decades and more, in the course of which a good deal of useful experience has been accum...

Over the last decade, forestry has become increasingly more involved with and integrated into the more general rural development (RD) process in the Third World. In doing so, forestry joins an activity that has itself been developing and maturing for some three decades and more, in the course of which a good deal of useful experience has been accum...

Development By People: Citizen Construction of a Just World. By Guy Gran. New York: Praeger, UK distributor Holt‐Saunders, 1983. Pp.xxiv + 480. £34.50 and £9.95.ISBN 0 03 063294 3 and 063296 X.No Shortcuts to Progress: African Development Management in Perspective. By Goran Hyden. London: Heinemann, 1983. Pp.xv + 223. £12.50 and £4.95. ISBN 0 435 9...

During this period, four successive regimes in Bangladesh have felt reluctantly compelled to set up structures for local participation in government. Each found it had to reach out beyond the support of urban and rural élites and the military if it was to move beyond mere stability to real development of the country. Despite many problems, most not...

Given the system of parliamentary democracy that India developed after its independence in 1947, it is understandable that pluralism came to be the major paradigm used to explain Indian politics. But just as the persistence of economic inequality was instrumental in calling pluralism into question as an appropriate model for explaining the American...

For a time in the mid-1960s, the Comilla programme in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) seemed to represent a viable answer to the quest for a rural development programme that would truly benefit small farmers. In the ensuing years, however, the programme came to be dominated by the bigger farmers, largely because of the realities of class structure...

A Handbook to Elections in Uttar Pradesh, 1920–1951. By ReevesP. D., GrahamB. D., and GoodmanJ. M.. Delhi: Manohar Book Service, 1975. lxxvi, 504 pp. Maps, Bibliography, Indexes. Rs. 100.00 (Dist. by South Asia Books, $17.00) - Volume 37 Issue 1 - Harry W. Blair

This paper aims to develop the beginnings of a workable pro-poor strategy for civil society efforts in rural Bangladesh that will use advocacy to help the poor move beyond the patron-client relationships on which they have historically depended. New survey research indicates a great deal of movement into and out of poverty, and this combined with r...