Demanding Development
The Politics of Public Goods Provision in India's Urban Slums

Explains the uneven success of India's slum dwellers in demanding and securing essential public services from the state.

Adam Michael Auerbach (Author)

9781108741330, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 31 October 2019

328 pages, 38 b/w illus. 26 tables
22.7 x 15.3 x 2 cm, 0.49 kg

'… Demanding Development provides a groundbreaking perspective on how citizens build responsive state institutions from the bottom up.' Journal of Development Studies

India's urban slums exhibit dramatic variation in their access to local public goods and services - paved roads, piped water, trash removal, sewers, and streetlights. Why are some vulnerable communities able to demand and secure development from the state while others fail? Drawing on more than two years of fieldwork in the north Indian cities of Bhopal and Jaipur, Demanding Development accounts for the uneven success of India's slum residents in securing local public goods and services. Auerbach's theory centers on the political organization of slum settlements and the informal slum leaders who spearhead resident efforts to make claims on the state - in particular, those slum leaders who are party workers. He finds striking variation in the extent to which networks of party workers have spread across slum settlements. Demanding Development shows how this variation in the density and partisan distribution of party workers across settlements has powerful consequences for the ability of residents to politically mobilize to improve local conditions.

1. Puzzling disparities at the margins of the city
2. Setting the stage: governance and political parties in Urban India
3. How party worker networks impact local development
4. India's slum leaders
5. Views from the ground: narratives from eight squatter settlements
6. Party workers and public goods provision: evidence from 111 settlements
7. Why party worker networks spread unevenly across settlements.

Subject Areas: Comparative politics [JPB], Asian history [HBJF]