Policy Analysis in India: Research Bases and Discursive Practices

Abstract

In order to provide an account of the dominant form of policy analysis in India, we direct attention towards the relationship between the political order and the practice of policy analysis (Fischer 1993, 21), where the initially dominant developmental paradigm termed “the Nehruvian Consensus”1 created and maintained reliance upon economic-expert institutions as the primary tools of developmental policy research (Mathur 2001). From the 1950s onwards, this paradigmatic political program, framed through a technical rationality of economic development, was supported by a mainly generalist bureaucracy, whose key role was to manage the implementation of development policy in India. More recently, the growth of independent research institutions that variously play roles of advocacy and political campaigners has created a process of redefi ning of public problems. In terms of policy analysis, greater attention is paid to policy impacts at the level of target populations, and problems are increasingly reframed through a diversity of lenses, especially accounting for the protest movements against inappropriate or inadequate state action. As a challenge, social analyses and methodologies began to poke holes in the rigid economistic system. Governmental institutions, experts and technocrats, in this current context, have been far from successful in settling such debates, faced with alternative experts and alternative sources of evidence that bring the hard experience of policy-community interaction to the table. The space for debate about alternatives has expanded and a new generation of policy professionals, both within and outside the bounds of state institutions has helped facilitate deliberation on issues that were previously in the domain of state control. Now, technocratic claims from the establishment elites are tested through alternative empirical evidence that incorporates the lived experience and counter-factual claims of those academic-experts turned activists representing disadvantaged communities.2 Environmental struggles have particularly highlighted governmental policy failures, and brought up critical perspectives on community-based governance and the need for expert institutions to pay attention to local knowledge (Guha 1989; Baviskar 1995; Dreze et al. 1997; Nanda 1999). The move from “Government to Governance” (Pierre 2000) rather than the consequence of the “hollowing out of the state” appears in India as a political struggle to redefi ne the nature of Indian democracy, from an elite one to a more participatory polity. These set of factors, in our assessment have contributed to the nascent emergence of policy analysis as a more diverse fi eld in its own right, weakening the hegemony of economism to some extent.

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