Modes of Governance and Local Economic Development: An Integrated Framework for Comparative Analysis of the Globalizing Cities of India

Abstract

This article explores how variations in provincial-state and city-level political cultures influence urban economic trajectory by mediating forces emerging out of global economic demand and a uniform national regulatory regime. The research shows how an integrated urban governance framework designed to analyze and compare governance modes of advanced capitalist cities through a fixed set of criteria (e.g., governing relations, governing logic, key decision makers, and political objectives) could be recalibrated through inclusion of additional parameters (e.g., local political culture and scalar location of power) so as to expand its applicability to an emerging economy, such as India, having a large, mostly poor, rural population and a high degree of internal sociocultural diversity. Competition between India’s regional elites to attract global information technology (IT)-enabled “business process outsourcing” economy investments, through land-use conversion of farmlands at the outer periphery of the metropolitan regions, forms the backdrop of the research.

Global contagion and local response: the influence of centre–state relations and political culture in pandemic governance

“…Thus, policy actions are informed by the norms and values within which the key actors of the state-level governing regime, are embedded, even while they operate within the structural constraints imposed at the national-scale. Leftwich (2010) and Chatterji (2016) suggest that sub-national policy decisions and their implementation mechanisms in Asian developing countries are often subject to a higher degree of intervention from local political elites, compared to countries with stronger local institutions. Recent research in the Covid-19 context also suggests that the character of the governing regime (Greer et al, 2020), including the political objectives of key actors (Pulejo & Querubin, 2020) and local cultural traits (Baniamin et al, 2020;Frey et al, 2020), has been significant in shaping governance responses, despite the recommendations of public health professionals for almost globally uniform policies of strict lockdown and stringent health protocols.…”

Managerial, clientelist or populist? Lake governance in the Indian city of Bangalore

“…In order to understand the lake conservation challenges faced by Bangalore, this article draws on DiGaetano and Strom's framework on urban governance (DiGaetano & Strom, 2003;Pierre, 2014) and analyses the different modes of governance associated with the city's lakes. This approach is a methodological innovation since modes of governance are generally used for analysis at the city level: for comparing and contrasting governance phenomena across cities on a wide range of issues such as economic development (Chatterji, 2017), tourism (Wan & Bramwell, 2015) and faith-based social activity (Dahan, 2019). However, limited empirical research has been conducted on analysing how different modes of governance influence outcomes at lower levels of aggregation, such as at the sub-city level.…”