NEW BOOK!
Patching Development: Information Politics and Social Change in India
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Won the Honorable Mention Award for the American Sociological Association’s Sociology of Development's Book Award, 2022
How can development programs deliver benefits to marginalized citizens in ways that expand their rights and freedoms? Political will and good policy design are critical but often insufficient due to resistance from entrenched local power systems. The book is an ethnography of one of the largest development programs in the world, the Indian National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), and examines in detail NREGA’s implementation in the South Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. It finds that the local system of power is extremely difficult to transform, not because of inertia, but because of coercive counter strategy from actors at the last mile and their ability to exploit information asymmetries. Upper-level NREGA bureaucrats in Andhra Pradesh do not possess the capacity to change the power axis through direct confrontation with local elites, but instead have relied on a continuous series of responses that react to local implementation and information, a process of patching development. Patching development is a top-down, fine-grained, iterative socio-technical process that makes local information about implementation visible through technology and enlists participation from marginalized citizens through social audits. These processes are neither neat nor orderly and have led to a contentious sphere where the exercise of power over documents, institutions and technology is intricate, fluid and highly situated. The book throws new light on the challenges and benefits of using information and technology in novel ways to implement development programs. While focused on one Indian state, the implications for increasing citizen participation and government transparency have global relevance.
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/patching-development-9780197567821?lang=en&cc=us
Author Bio
Rajesh Veeraraghavan is an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2015. He has been researching and writing about the politics of data and technology and its role in improving the lives of marginalized citizens for the last 15 years. More at www.rajeshveera.org
Blurbs on the book:
How do you get cash payments for labor to the rural poor in the world's largest anti-poverty program? From the commanding heights of the bureaucracy to the front-lines of the village, from sophisticated software to grass roots social audits, Patching Development brilliantly shows us how the National Rural Employment Guarantee program in India has confronted the infamous problems of the last mile. The challenges and conflicts of implementing public policies to fight poverty have never been illuminated in such detail and with such analytic power." - Patrick Heller, Professor of Sociology and International and Public Affairs, Brown University
"Brilliant! In Patching Development, Veeraraghavan offers an innovative solution to bureaucratic hierarchy that is unable to respond to clients as it faces off against local power structures." - Michael Burawoy, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley
"Peppered with exhilarating stories from in-depth research among tribal communities, village councils, social activists, and state officials, Patching Development illuminates a rare case where a combination of political will and digital technology enables democratically accountable socio-economic transformation." - Kentaro Toyama, W.K. Kellogg Professor of Community Information, University of Michigan
"Veeraraghavan provides an excellent sectional analysis of social audit as patching—a mechanism to check misuse of money and authority in MGNREGA, a massive Indian public works programme. An important addition to systemic research on poverty and unemployment, Patching Development enriches the discussion on the challenges and potential of this emergent process." - Aruna Roy, Activist, Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan
"Development theory needs fresh thinking to move forward. Patching Development answers the call. The multilevel contestation of public officials, local politicians, and social movements is dissected together with the possibilities and limits of information technology to create a synthetic, original vision of how the needs of the poor might be better served." - Peter Evans, Professor of Sociology Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley
Available:
https://www.amazon.com/Patching-Development-Information-Politics-Social/dp/0197567827
Reviews: Rachel Brule, SAARG - Click here
Reviews: Diego Maiorano (2022): Patching development: information politics and social change in India, Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, DOI: 10.1080/14662043.2022.2140873 (click here)
Reviews: Smitha Radhakrishnan, Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews (Click here)