Brick by Brick: Democratising Local Governance in Kerala Insights from the People's Plan Campaign(Hardcover, Manjula Bharathy)
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People's Planning Campaign (PPC) was an innovative decentralised planning exercise experimented by the Left Democratic Government in Kerala (1996-2001) for deepening local governance. PPC conceptualised poverty in relation to a host of inequalities such as economic dispossession and political marginalisation in contrast to technocratic and neoliberal prescriptions. Rather than placing faith in either the rational and comprehensive decision-making or incremental institution building championed by public administration and managerial sciences, PPC relied on local experiences emerged through reflexive reasoning and dialectical engagements with citizens. This volume analyses two critical components of the PPC-Women Component Plan (WCP) and Tribal Sub Plan (TSP)- designed to empower the most marginalised citizens in Kerala: women and the Scheduled Tribes. Through detailed examination of the processes of mobilisation, conscientisation, and citizenship targeting these groups, the book assesses the possibilities and limitations of planning processes devised to politicise and redress the grievances of the dispossessed. In doing so, the analysis contrast the depth of participation, the nature and quality of deliberative processes, and the substantive outcomes of participation for these two marginalised groups, along with a detailed analysis of the reasons for the ineffective media strategies of the PPC and their dysfunctional interventions that failed in countering the hegemonic social and political power structures.