Suchergebnisse

NGOs have been lauded both for being political entrepreneurs- facilitators of transformative politics- and also development agents- implementers of participatory development. However, not many believe that NGOs can successfully combine both these roles. This view arises from a larger cynicism of the development machinery that constantly strives to exclude 'politics'. In India too, NGO-state relationships affirm that politically confrontationist NGOs have frequently been oppressed. This article presents a case study of an NGO in a central Indian state that, over an entire decade, was able to combine development work regarded as legitimate by the state with practices resisting state action in development. It demonstrates that the 'depoliticisation' of development is not always a successful state project with predictable consequences. Moreover, the NGO's seemingly dual stance was itself unreal, as resistance and acquiescence were interwoven with one another in subtle ways. The article rejects familiar binaries deployed to study NGOs, i.e. of state-civil society or mainstream-alternative development, and focuses instead on key junctures in the NGO's life history. It concludes that NGOs, operating within appropriate political conditions can be both political entrepreneurs and development agents, and indeed, this synthesis holds the key to their power.

Experiences in the post-partition Indian subcontinent refute the conventional expectation that the 'possession of citizenship enables the acquisition of documents certifying it' [Jayal 2013. Citizenship and Its Discontents: An Indian History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 71]. Instead, identity papers of various types play a vital part in certifying and authenticating claims to citizenship. This is particularly important in a context where the history of state formation, continuous migration flows and the rise of right-wing majoritarian politics has created an uncertain situation for individuals deemed to be on the 'margins' of the state. The papers that constitute this special issue bring together a range of disciplinary perspectives in order to investigate the history, politics and materiality of identity documents, and to dismantle citizenship as an absolute and fixed notion, seeking instead to theorise the very mutable 'hierarchies' and 'degrees' of citizenship. Collectively they offer a valuable lens onto how migrants, refugees and socio-economically marginal individuals negotiate their relationship with the state, both within South Asia and in South Asian diaspora communities. This introduction examines the wider context of the complex intersections between state-issued identity documents and the nature of citizenship and draws out cross-cutting themes across the papers in this collection.

Governance is becoming increasingly important in development and poverty reduction policies. However, the forms and methods by which it is to be incorporated into donor programs are only emerging at present. In this paper, we contrast two very different approaches- the White House led Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) and DFID's Drivers of Change (DOC) Approach- to analysing governance, and compare their theoretical underpinnings. A key factor explaining why these different approaches have been adopted is that for the USA, global poverty reduction is a footnote to its foreign policy and national security agenda, whereas in the UK, global poverty reduction engages both the national political leadership and the civil society. In the conclusion, the paper suggests that enduring contradictions confronted by all donors complicate the treatment of governance in empirically nuanced terms (as DOC attempts to do) while privileging a more universalistic approach like the MCA.