Negotiating New Development Hybrids: State Expertise and Civil Society Participation in Irrigation Design

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

During the past thirty years, the impact of international development efforts has been limited by a lack of participatory planning and public accountability from government agencies. This post-doctoral project evaluates how government development paradigms are being replaced by new hybrids that combine state technocratic expertise with meaningful citizen participation. Focusing on irrigation development reforms in central India, the project builds on an NSF supported dissertation thesis, titled "Some Water for All: People's Science Lessons from the Krishna Valley in India". The thesis examines how grassroots movements in India are fighting drought by designing irrigation projects that integrate expert and locally-based knowledge toward the promotion of social equity and environmental regeneration. The applicant will now add a new layer to the dissertation work by concentrating on bureaucratic expertise. The post-doctoral research will shift attention toward government officials. By ethnographically examining the work of irrigation engineers employed by the Maharashtra Krishna Valley Development Corporation (MKVDC), this research will evaluate why and how state experts are reforming their rhetoric, and administrative procedures, as a result of civil society pressure. The researcher will create an institutional profile of the agency, as well as examine the role key officers have played in the process of bureaucratic reform. In terms of intellectual merit, the applicant's proposal innovatively integrates theoretical approaches from the fields of political ecology and science and technology studies (STS). Analytical tools from STS, including the social construction of technology and actor-network theory, will be employed to bridge the gaps between bureaucratic praxis and public critique. In particular, the research will ask: How do certain norms of expertise guide decision-making authority and create cultures of acceptance? Who is involved in knowledge and technology production and why? How do community perceptions of knowledge get reconciled with those produced by state professionals? Which institutional characteristics render technology democratifiable? The applicant's post-doctoral project will be sponsored by Professor Sheila Jasanoff of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Under Professor Jasanoff's mentorship, the applicant will engage with STS constructivist theories and qualitative policy research methods. In addition to working with Professor Jasanoff, the applicant will also collaborate with Harvard's Public Infrastructure Program, the Environment and Natural Resources Program and the Center for International Development. Of broader societal relevance, the applicant's research will address how communities balance the need for bureaucratic control and decision-making authority at the meso-level with participatory approaches to technical research and development at the local level. Building on the STS coursework she will undertake, and interactions with a new network of policy-oriented scholars, the applicant will use the fellowship period to consolidate the dissertation and post-doctoral research into one book. As a symmetrical analysis of both bureaucratic practice and social movement organizing, this book will make an important theoretical and empirical contribution toward the re-invention of state development expertise.