Governance at the margins : the challenge of implementing slum housing policy in Maharashtra, India

Building Services for the Urban Poor (BSUP) is an in-situ slum housing up-gradation policy that was initiated in 2005 by the Central Government of India under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM). It is one of the few housing policies in the long history of slum housing policies in India where housing provision for the poor is linked to governance reform (i.e., governance building at the city level). Today (2015) the first phase of the program is complete and the second phase more than 50% complete. A study of the BSUP phase-1 projects offers a unique opportunity to understand the impact of governance building on policy implementation, one of the areas of policy analysis that has been relatively less studied in India. This thesis develops a comparative study of two projects recently completed under the BSUP program in Yerwada in Pune city in Maharashtra. The thesis expands the notion of governance from the community (the governed) and the government (the governing) binary to all the co-governance actors involved in the multi-agency implementation system: the private for-profit agents, the civil society agencies, the community, the local political actors, technical consultants and the administrators. The research demonstrates that a governance building process that allows for transparency, efficiency, representation, responsiveness, accountability and equity can support successful policy implementation. To support these values defining the implementation "process" is as important as establishing the "structure", wherein structure defines the architecture of institutions that support implementation and process defines the mechanism of decision making, the strategy for shaping attitudes and methods of norm creation. In conclusion the case demonstrates that governance building can accomplish successful implementation of public policy in marginal conditions with marginal institutional and stakeholder capacities.

Department dc:contributor.department

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

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2015

Author dc:creator

• Rawoot, Smita

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Lawrence Vale.

• 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/1721.1/99089

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/99089