Demanding Development Hardcover

Adam Michael Auerbach

India's urban slums exhibit dramatic variation in their access to local public goods and services - paved roads, piped water, trash removal, sewers, and streetlights. Why are some vulnerable communities able to demand and secure development from the state while others fail? Drawing on more than two years of fieldwork in the north Indian cities of Bhopal and Jaipur, Demanding Development accounts for the uneven success of India's slum residents in securing local public goods and services. Auerbach's theory centers on the political organization of slum settlements and the informal slum leaders who spearhead resident efforts to make claims on the state - in particular, those slum leaders who are party workers. He finds striking variation in the extent to which networks of party workers have spread across slum settlements. Demanding Development shows how this variation in the density and partisan distribution of party workers across settlements has powerful consequences for the ability of residents to politically mobilize to improve local conditions.

1108491936

9781108491938

English

Cambridge University Press

31-Oct-19

Adam Michael Auerbach is an assistant professor in the School of International Service at American University, Washington, DC. His doctoral dissertation won the Best Fieldwork Award from the Comparative Democratization Section of the American Political Science Association (APSA), the Best Dissertation Award from the Urban and Local Politics Section of APSA, and APSA's Gabriel A. Almond Award for Best Dissertation in Comparative Politics. His research on politics and development in urban India has appeared in the American Political Science Review, Contemporary South Asia, Studies in Comparative International Development, World Development, and World Politics.