Localising National Accountability Claims in Fragile Settings: The Right to Food Campaign in India

How does a national movement go local in places with multiple armed actors, simultaneously retaining credibility at the grass roots, while making claims and negotiating with the state? This article explores how a rights-based movement, the Right to Food (RTF) in India, with a strong national core and some state-level support expanded into areas that were experiencing militant insurgency. We find that the RTF movement was able to coexist with the militant groups because the movement: (a) brought new framings and issues to existing groups that were already working with vulnerable populations; and (b) distinguished itself from the militant groups in terms of substantive issues and approach (avoiding issues of displacement and land rights), as it was willing to work with the state to tackle issues of hunger and food entitlements.Department for International Development (DFID

Anti-Corruption Movement: A Story of the Making of the Aam Admi Party and the Interplay of Political Representation in India

The Aam Admi Party (AAP; Party of the Common Man) was founded as the political outcome of an anti-corruption movement in India that lasted for 18 months between 2010–2012. The anti-corruption movement, better known as the India Against Corruption Movement (IAC), demanded the passage of the Janlokpal Act, an Ombudsman body. The movement mobilized public opinion against corruption and the need for the passage of a law to address its rising incidence. The claim to eradicate corruption captured the imagination of the middle class, and threw up several questions of representation. The movement prompted public and media debates over who represented civil society, who could claim to represent the ‘people’, and asked whether parliamentary democracy was a more authentic representative of the people’s wishes vis-à-vis a people’s democracy where people expressed their opinion through direct action. This article traces various ideas of political representation within the IAC that preceded the formation of the AAP to reveal the emergence of populist representative democracy in India. It reveals the dynamic relationship forged by the movement with the media, which created a political field that challenged liberal democratic principles and legitimized popular public perception and opinion over laws and institutions

Social Accountability in Big Cities: Strategies and Institutions in Delhi and São Paulo

There are signs that public services can improve in big cities when the urban poor hold providers directly accountable – what we now call social accountability. We do not know, however, to what extent the urban poor, through their civil society groups, engage in forms of social accountability nor what strategies they use. We do not know what factors lead the poor to choose accountability as a way to secure access to essential services, rather than clientelism, electing representatives to public office or simply self-provisioning. We need to answer these questions in order to develop programmes that support accountability initiatives and understand the potential social accountability has to improve the basic public services. We designed a unique comparative study to take a step in this direction. The study compares activism by the urban poor to improve two essential types of services in the cities of Delhi and São Paulo, primary healthcare and social assistance. The unusual comparison between a South Asian and Latin American city, and across two very different types of services, gives us greater capacity to sort through different possible causes of accountability activism by the urban poor and explanations for the different types of strategies people use. In the two cities, we find, a substantial share of civil society groups attempt to improve health and welfare services by holding providers accountable. They seek to establish greater accountability as one of several types of engagement strategies with the state – that is, accountability is a part of a larger repertoire of activism. There is large variation, however, in the level of activity and type of strategies in the two cities, and across the two services. Surprisingly, accountability activism is most robust in health in São Paulo and welfare (Public Distribution System, PDS) in Delhi; and least in welfare (Family Minimum Income Guarantee) in São Paulo and health in Delhi. Understanding the sources of this variation is one of the challenges of our paper. We look at whether the type of organisation and sources of funding influence accountability activity, and whether it matters whether civil society groups are local or translocal, or active in several areas of the city. We look at whether the type of service, or how services are provided, shapes activism. And we explore whether institutional factors, such as the right to information legislation in India and participatory governance councils in Brazil, which create different kinds of incentives or opportunities for civil society actors, impact levels of activity and what strategies are adopted