Nandi, Anulekha 
ORCID: 0000-0002-1421-1525
(2019)
Building participatory institutions for public service delivery through access to information in rural India: lessons from DEF's SoochnaSeva and SoochnaPreneur model.
In: Sustainability and Development conference 2019, 2019-10-11 - 2019-10-14, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, United States, USA.
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Abstract
The paper discusses strategies to overcome barriers of access to social protection. It identifies that such barriers could be classified into two types: the first type consists of inflexible structural barriers like political clientelism and elite capture etc. that result from rules and practices of institutions of local governance nested within social institutions that reproduce configurations of power and control. The second type of barrier refers to constraints on agency of individuals that prevent them from claiming welfare rights due to them. This paper argues that a structural change that is required to effect a transformation in how rights to social protection are practised on the ground would be a function of temporality and it could take years to make a dent on configurations of power that lead to practices of exclusion. This does not go on to say that structural change is not possible or undesirable or an unworthy pursuit. In the long term, collective action may be able to affect the deeper levels of rules that structure action and outcome. However, in the short-term, individuals at the operational level may have little flexibility or opportunity to move beyond the rules that are currently constraining their actions. Therefore, on the pathway towards structural change, there needs to be strategies in place that can mediate access to entitlements through amelioration of constraints to agency through the means of a system of participatory practices that can reduce the gap between eligibility and entitlement. This is what this paper calls the politics of the possible. By using lessons from DEF’ s integrated access to information and micro-social entrepreneurship programmes, the paper aims to translate those learnings into a practical and analytical framework that can be used to work on and strategise the attainment of rights-based outcomes.
| Item Type: | Conference or Workshop Item (Paper) |
|---|---|
| Official URL: | https://www.defindia.org/publication-2/ |
| Additional Information: | © 2019 The Author |
| Divisions: | Management |
| Subjects: | H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform |
| Date Deposited: | 17 Nov 2020 15:21 |
| Last Modified: | 17 Oct 2024 17:06 |
| URI: | http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/107457 |
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