Performing Participatory Citizenship - Politics and Power in Kerala's Kudumbashree Programme

TL;DR: Kudumbashree, the Poverty Eradication Mission for the Indian State of Kerala, operates through female-only Neighbourhood Groups, which aim to con....

Abstract: This article examines the operation of Kudumbashree, the Poverty Eradication Mission for the Indian State of Kerala. Kudumbashree operates through female-only Neighbourhood Groups, which aim to con...

Summary

Introduction: Managing Poverty and Performing Citizenship

• Kudumbashree, the Poverty Eradication Mission for the Indian State of Kerala, provides an interesting snapshot of current poverty alleviation practices and their implications for the relationships between citizens, the local state, and a dynamic ‘political society’.
• First, it needs to look at the impact which these interventions have on their intended participants, taking seriously the argument that they can reshape their behaviour and values.
• The counter to these arguments about civil society’s malleability is the claim that the success or failure of state-sponsored spaces of participation is largely shaped by pre-existing structures of civil and political society (Baiocchi et al. 2008).
• Understanding which groups of ‘the poor’ have been unable to participate fully within Kudumbashree and why, and what this implies for the state’s overall treatment of poverty, is therefore an important task.
• They ask wider questions about the performances which such programmes require of participants, the interactions between the institutional design of participatory arenas and local political contexts, and the patterns of exclusion/inclusion produced by their underlying visions of how poverty should be managed.

Kerala’s Kudumbashree Programme

• Kerala is justly famous for having human development indicators which far surpass those of many richer countries, and for being one of the Left’s political strongholds within India.
• Kudumbashree, launched in 1998, has been important in supporting this decentralisation drive, and its particular framing of a development ‘problem’ around gender, participation and poverty is also understandable in this context.
• The first is to be active thrift and credit societies: all NHGs should undertake regular group based savings (of at least Rs.1 per member per day), and through this create revolving credit funds that contribute to interlinked developmental gains.
• Here, the NHGs are explicitly intended to provide the means whereby poor women’s ‘voice’ can influence local governance practices.
• Second, Kerala’s history shows why participatory governance was supported by the CPI(M), and also the politicised context within which Kudumbashree operates.

Kudumbashree in operation

• The empirical work presented here is part of a wider study of the participatory governance practices in West Bengal and Kerala, and within Kerala this centred on extended semi-structured interviews in two case-study panchayats , each of which was located in one of the State’s poorer Districts.
• V Both Districts were included in the first round of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme on the grounds of their relative poverty, and both had also suffered from farmer suicides in the wake of the agrarian crisis which broke after 2000 (see Menon and Nair, 2007).
• The political leadership of all parties primarily came from same richer strata of settler groups: the Muslim League, the Congress Party and the CPI(M) were all actively vying for control of the panchayat, but in sharp contrast to Palakkad, none had particularly well established organisational structures on the ground, and no single party was dominant.
• Regional economic backwardness certainly curtails the opportunities for entrepreneurialism open to Kudumbashree women, and the absence of the KSSP activists in their Palakkad panchayat also meant that groups had limited professional support to augment their own resources and experiences.
• Kudumbashree had thus penetrated deeply into both their study’s panchayats: not only did around half of all households have someone placed within a neighbourhood group, but also through this women (and particularly those involved in the ADSs and CDSs) were being closely integrated with the everyday work of the local state.

Enacting ‘Participatory Citizenship’: Kudubashree and Engagement with the Local State

• There are clear indications that through involvement in the neighbourhood groups and the everyday activities of the local state, Kudumbashree was making some women more visible within public space.
• In the latest election, I was elected ADS Chairperson.
• First, tying Kudumbashree groups to structures of local governance, and making them responsible for elements of their planning, itself implies potential conflict between formal elected representatives and views expressed by women participating in voluntary groups, however internally democratic these may be.
• Low-status groups beyond the pale of ‘mainstream’ society are likely to find insurmountable barriers to their participation, but also to be joined in their exclusion by other pockets of households finding themselves marginsalised through their position within local political or communal divisions.
• The Kudumbashree Mission’s intention of ‘reaching out to the community through the family’ was thus making women more visible in the public life of the panchayats, but this was also causing some resentment from the women concerned, particularly in those situations when it was obvious to them that their providision of labour was not matched by decision-making power.

Conclusions

• This evaluation of Kerala’s Kudumbashree programme has illustrated three main arguments.
• Kudumbashree’s federated groups of poor women may be ‘artificial’ creations engineered to link to and support the local state, but they have value in themselves, both in facilitating what are sometimes dramatic changes to the lives of individual participants, and in their broader challenge to everyday understandings of ‘correct’ female behaviour.
• Throughout the State, the programme is highly politicised due to both ambiguities in the formal institutional relationships between ADSs/CDSs and the panchayats, and the open competition between Kudumbashree and rival organisations over the membership and political loyalties of women’s self-help groups.
• Third, it is important to question Kudumbashree’s wider framing of the linkages between poverty alleviation and active citizenship.
• In short, the authors must always ask what it is that people are being encouraged to participate in.

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Performing Participatory Citizenship - Politics and
Power in Kerala’s Kudumbashree Programme
Glyn Williams, Binitha V Thampi, D Narayana, Sailaja Nandigama,
Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya
To cite this version:
Glyn Williams, Binitha V Thampi, D Narayana, Sailaja Nandigama, Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya.
Performing Participatory Citizenship - Politics and Power in Kerala’s Kudumbashree Pro-
gramme. The Journal of Development Studies, Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2011, pp.1.
�10.1080/00220388.2010.527949�. �hal-00722234�

For Peer Review Only
Performing Participatory Citizenship –
Politics and Power in
Kerala’s Kudumbashree Programme
Journal:
Journal of Development Studies
Manuscript ID:
FJDS-2009-Dec-0045.R1
Manuscript Type:
Original Manuscripts
Keywords:
South Asia < Geographical Area, Civil Society < Government, State
Policy, & Ideologies, Governance < Government, State Policy, &
Ideologies, Community participation < Social Issues, Poverty <
Social Issues
URL: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/fjds
Journal of Development Studies

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Performing Participatory Citizenship…
1
Performing Participatory Citizenship – Politics and Power in Kerala’s
Kudumbashree Programme.
Abstract
This paper examines the operation of Kudumbashree, the Poverty Eradication Mission for the Indian
State of Kerala. Kudumbashree operates through female-only Neighbourhood Groups, which aim to
contribute to their participants’ economic uplift, and to integrate them with the activities and
institutions of local governance. As such, Kudumbashree echoes poverty alleviation programmes
elsewhere in the Global South designed to link poverty alleviation to ‘active citizenship’. This paper
evaluates the programme, looking in turn at its impacts on women’s participation in public space, its
attempts to engineer participatory citizenship through engagement with the local state, and the wider
consequences of its particular linking of participation and poverty alleviation for processes of exclusion
within Kerala. It argues that although the programme has undoubtedly been successful in its scale and in
supporting women’s public participation, questions remain over both the autonomy of the ‘invited
spaces’ it has created, and the underlying vision of poverty alleviation it embodies.
Introduction: Managing Poverty and Performing Citizenship
Kudumbashree, the Poverty Eradication Mission for the Indian State of Kerala, provides an interesting
snapshot of current poverty alleviation practices and their implications for the relationships between
citizens, the local state, and a dynamic ‘political society’. Although – as will be detailed below – many
aspects of this Mission are unique to Kerala, it has broader relevance to contemporary trends in the
management of poverty elsewhere across the global South in two specific ways: it emphasises poor
people’s involvement in their own ‘uplift’, and it directly links poverty alleviation programmes with
participatory forms of governance. At the heart of Kudumbashree is the organisation of poor women
into neighbourhood groups (NHGs) supported by and engaging with the local state, which are intended
to improve participants’ economic wellbeing and to further their empowerment. This vision has made
Kudumbashree a model for poverty alleviation programmes elsewhere in India (Government of India,
2008: 90-4), and chimes with trends in international policy where such ‘active citizenship has become
the privileged object of development imaginaries’ (Robins et al., 2008: 1071). This paper evaluates
Kudumbashree’s impacts on poor women, focusing on the possibilities and limitations of the particular
forms of ‘active citizenship’ it envisages. First, however, we briefly outline the analytical perspective
through which we make this evaluation.
We begin with the observation that although it has been commonplace over the last decade to argue
that participation and empowerment are crucial elements of poverty reduction, detailed political
analysis is often lacking within the development policy literature (Hickey, 2008; Robins et al. 2008).
Much attention is given to mechanisms to build poor people’s social capital within poverty alleviation
programmes, or to the institutional design of spaces in which poor people’s participation is promoted,
but rather less is given to the power-laden contexts within which such interventions are to take place. In
short, despite the fact that ‘active citizens’ are the intended beneficiaries (and outcomes) of state-of-
the-art poverty reduction programmes, analysis of the relationship between the interventions through
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which poor and marginalised people are to achieve this empowerment and existing patterns of
governance is often underdeveloped.
In response, this paper argues that an evaluation of the Kudumbashree programme, or of other state-
sponsored attempts to link poverty alleviation to participatory citizenship, should address three
important tasks. First, it needs to look at the impact which these interventions have on their intended
participants, taking seriously the argument that they can reshape their behaviour and values. Earlier
debates within the participatory development literature put forward starkly opposed positions: for its
boosters, participation offered a space in which professionals would experience almost revelatory
‘reversals’ in their worldviews (see Chambers, 1997) whilst for its detractors, it was a tyrannical
masternarrative which undermined autonomous political action (Rahnema, 1997; Henkel and Stirrat
2001: see Williams, 2004 for a critique). As this literature has matured, there is a recognition that
experiments in participatory governance do matter, but more subtly through the forms of behaviour
their institutional designs encourage. Fung and Wright (2003) argue that experiments in ‘empowered
participatory governance’ can ideally act as ‘schools for democracy’, allowing participants the space
both to (re)formulate their political interests and to develop their political capacities through their active
engagement in participatory processes. Cornwall (2004) balances this potential against the costs of
these ‘invited spaces’ of participation: they require participants to act out roles and behaviours
envisaged by the state, and this can act to delegitimate other forms of political engagement, or close
down informal and indigenous forms of public space. Common to both is an understanding that civil
society is to some degree malleable in the face of intentional designs to promote participation: whether
participants take up their roles sincerely, reluctantly or instrumentally, these designs can change the
ways in which they express their political agency, and their everyday interactions with the state and in
the public sphere. Participatory citizenship is thus a performance, in Judith Butler’s sense
i
, and one
which can have powerful, lasting effects on individuals despite the ‘artificiality’ of the arenas in which it
is played out.
The counter to these arguments about civil society’s malleability is the claim that the success or failure
of state-sponsored spaces of participation is largely shaped by pre-existing structures of civil and
political society (Baiocchi et al. 2008). Rather than treating this as a rival hypothesis to be tested, we see
it as indicating a second task for the evaluation of these ‘invited spaces’: we need to investigate how
they shape performances of citizenship at an individual level, but in addition show how attempts to
engineer participatory citizenship are located within (and co-constitutive of) multi-layered political
contexts. The literature assessing experiments in participatory municipal budgeting in Brazil indicates
two related tasks here. The first is to ask ‘why would governments transfer decision-making power to
deliberative spaces?’ (Abers, 2003: 201), or to account for the interests which have led to new
governmental arrangements in the first place. The second is to see how these deliberative spaces might
change the relationships between civil society and the (local) state: here, Brazilian reforms have been
successful in shifting civil society organisations’ mode of engagement with the state from clientalism
towards rule-bound, transparent associationalism, but not in developing their relative autonomy
(Baiocchi et al. 2008). It is thus possible that participatory development fora can become central to
community life (Baiochhi, 2006), but remain forms of political ‘tutelage’ dependent upon the state and
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open to political capture. Here we aim to take up both tasks by investigating Kudumbashree within
Kerala’s history of decentralisation and the political mobilisation of the Left, arguing that the local
variations in political culture and party-political dynamics are important in determining the relative
autonomy of Kudumbashree groups.
The third element of evaluation is to contextualise programmes linking poverty alleviation to
participatory citizenship in another sense, to look at their role in ‘problematization’ (Li, 2007), the
framing and definition of the issue they intend to address. This framing inevitably involves choices: who
does the state invite into spaces for participation, which aspects of their disempowerment does it deem
problematic, and how should these be addressed? Especially where interventions have been a
significant focus of state activity, as Kudumbashree undoubtedly has within Kerala, it is important to
examine the effects these choices have on those who become marginal to the programme, as well as
those actively involved within it. Understanding which groups of ‘the poor’ have been unable to
participate fully within Kudumbashree and why, and what this implies for the state’s overall treatment
of poverty, is therefore an important task.
Taken together, these three elements in the evaluation of programmes which aim to link poverty
alleviation with participatory governance offer an analysis that extends beyond the immediate spaces
and activities of state-sponsored participation itself. They ask wider questions about the performances
which such programmes require of participants, the interactions between the institutional design of
participatory arenas and local political contexts, and the patterns of exclusion/inclusion produced by
their underlying visions of how poverty should be managed. It is with these questions in mind that we
begin our investigation of Kudumbashree, looking first at the programme itself and its location within
contemporary Kerala.
Kerala’s Kudumbashree Programme
Kerala is justly famous for having human development indicators which far surpass those of many richer
countries, and for being one of the Left’s political strongholds within India. The Communist Party of
India, Marxist (CPI(M)) first gained power in the State in 1957, and was successful in delivering a radical
programme of agrarian land reform over the following decade. Since this date, control of Kerala’s State
Assembly has alternated between the CPI(M)-led Left Democratic Front (LDF) and the Congress-led
United Democratic Front (UDF), but within this picture of constant change the CPI(M) has always played
a major role in setting Kerala’s political agenda. The dominant mode of mobilising its primarily working-
class power base had been public and highly male-dominated struggles grounded in the demands
different employment groups. Significantly, these spread far beyond unions in the formal sector
(industrial and white collar) to include a variety of informal sector workers and agricultural labourers,
encorporating much of the state within a ‘Kerala model’ of employment-based social welfare. By the
late 1980s, however, the limits of this particular form of corporatism were becoming apparent: costs of
Kerala’s welfare model were mounting, and its impressive record in redistribution was marred by
increasing concerns over sluggish economic growth (Heller, 1995). In parallel, all-India debates on
decentralisation as a means to accountable, participatory and effective local governance had gathered
pace from the mid-1980s, supported by experiments in West Bengal, Karnataka and Kerala.
ii
These
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Frequently asked questions

Q1. What are the contributions in "Performing participatory citizenship - politics and power in kerala's kudumbashree programme" ?

This paper examines the operation of Kudumbashree, the Poverty Eradication Mission for the Indian State of Kerala. This paper evaluates the programme, looking in turn at its impacts on women ’ s participation in public space, its attempts to engineer participatory citizenship through engagement with the local state, and the wider consequences of its particular linking of participation and poverty alleviation for processes of exclusion within Kerala. Introduction: Managing Poverty and Performing Citizenship Kudumbashree, the Poverty Eradication Mission for the Indian State of Kerala, provides an interesting snapshot of current poverty alleviation practices and their implications for the relationships between citizens, the local state, and a dynamic ‘ political society ’. This paper evaluates Kudumbashree ’ s impacts on poor women, focusing on the possibilities and limitations of the particular forms of ‘ active citizenship ’ it envisages. In response, this paper argues that an evaluation of the Kudumbashree programme, or of other statesponsored attempts to link poverty alleviation to participatory citizenship, should address three important tasks. At the heart of Kudumbashree is the organisation of poor women into neighbourhood groups ( NHGs ) supported by and engaging with the local state, which are intended to improve participants ’ economic wellbeing and to further their empowerment. Fung and Wright ( 2003 ) argue that experiments in ‘ empowered participatory governance ’ can ideally act as ‘ schools for democracy ’, allowing participants the space both to ( re ) formulate their political interests and to develop their political capacities through their active engagement in participatory process s. Cornwall ( 2004 ) balances this potential against the costs of these ‘ invited spaces ’ of participation: they require participants to act out roles and behaviours envisaged by the state, and this can act to delegitimate other forms of political engagement, or close down informal and indigenous forms of public space.