Community-led participatory budgeting in Bangalore : learning from successful cases

Urban India is rapidly growing, and in cities like Bangalore, the dramatic changes have both positive and negative impacts. Citizens express concern about the capacity and credibility of local government and corporate sector in leading local development. In contrast to rural India where the 73rd amendment helped spur citizen participation in local decision-making, in urban India there have been limited channels for citizens to participate in governance outside of the electoral process. In 2001, a civil society organization, Janaagraha, launched a participatory budgeting campaign aimed at improving local governance through engaging citizens in local infrastructure planning. The campaign resulted in citizens' budget priorities being approved in over twenty percent of the city's wards. Large-scale participatory budgeting has traditionally been an initiative of ruling parties using the apparatus of the state. As a civil society initiative, the participants faced the dual challenges of mobilizing citizens to produce good plans and convincing local government that their plans were legitimate. This thesis aims to answer two questions. First, what were the attributes of the associations and political and spatial factors of the communities that were successful in a 2001 participatory budgeting campaign in Bangalore?

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Clay, Elizabeth M. (Elizabeth Margarette)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Ceasar McDowell.

• Urban Studies and Planning.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/40132

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/40132