Accelerated Water Sector Reforms in Karnataka and the Question of Democracy

Abstract

Abstract Achieving 'good governance' has been the determined path of development since the late 1990s. This dominant discourse posits Iiberal democracy, capitalist mode of economic growth and human rights as being complimentary and mutually dependent and asserts that with the right alignment of institutions, the promotion of good governance wi!! strengthen the political voice of the civil society, empower the poor and make governance establishments more accountable. This perception portrays good governance as a theory that intended to go beyond the debilitating effects of the earlier structural adjustment agenda which emphasized pro-market reforms in the so called developing countries and takes a depoliticized approach towards restoring the sovereignty of the Global South and put them back on the development path. Because of this seemingly ethica! strength of the development discourse coupled with the apparent socio-economic sensibility, good governance has enriched the imagination of development theorists, international development agencies, policy-makers and NGOs alike and contributed to the reinvention of the global development industry. Finally, there appeared to be a convergence of the participatoiy development aspect of community projects of the 1980s and the 1990s and rights-based approach of movements seeking to strengthen the sense of agency of marginalized communities and influence wider decision-making processes. But there are reasons to suspect that the capacity of the discourse to promote participatory democracy, alleviate poverty and generate equitable growth has been highly inflated. Based on more than ten years of research and experiential learning on the effects of good governance based reforms on the urban water sector in Karnataka, this thesis demonstrates how the type of democracy that the discourse has promoted is not in the least emancipatory especially when it creates situations where people have rights they cannot exercise, participate within a preordained policy framework, vote without being able to make a change and a supposed political equality which conceals extremely unequal power relations. 8 Based on a combined methodology of critical ethnography and the anthropology of public policy, this thesis offers a crucial challenge to the contemporary hegemonic development discourse on how despite the assertion of good governan@, the deepening of democracy and the realization of human rights are not congruent with market oriented reforms. I highlight three aspects of the context on which urban water reforms in Karnataka have been premised to make my point. The first is to critically engage with the claim that good governance can promote both capitalistic economic growth and participatory democracy. This policy instruction makes it mandatory for democracy to organize a political consensus promoting capitalism if it has to be termed 'good'. The second is to describe how the reforms are constructed to insist that commercialization and privatization of water services, whether private or public, lead to realization of the right to water by the poor and empower them to exercise their client power to make service providers accountable, triggering a virtuous spiral of participatory democracy. The third aspect is to highlight how the dominance of the good governance discourse in the water sector is being resisted and to explore opportunities and limitations offered by this struggle between the ones with the power to reform and the ones with the power to resist, in the deepening of democracy and the emergence of new forms of water governance that is socially just, culturally sensitive, economically prudent and ecologically sustainable. April, 2015