Water Policy Processes in India: Discourses of Power and Resistance / Edition 1

by Vandana Asthana

Overview

The privatization of water is a keenly contested issue in an economically-liberalizing India. Since the 1990s, large social groups across India's diverse and disparate peoples have been re-negotiating their cultural relationships with each other as to whether they support or oppose pro-privatization water policy reforms. These claims and counter claims are seen as an impending war over water resources, one that includes many different players with many different agendas located across a wide variety of sites whose actions and interactions shape policy production in India.

This book is the first to assess the dynamics of water policy processes in India. Using the case study of Delhi’s water situation, this book analyses emergent dynamics of policy process in India in general and, more specifically, in the post-economic reform era. Taking as its starting point a critique of linear version of policy making, the author explains both how and why particular types of knowledge, practices and values get established in policy as well as the complex interplay of knowledge, power and agency in water policy processes.

Water Policy Processes in India covers a critical gap in the literature by analyzing how governments in practice make policies that greatly affect the welfare of their people; the process through which policies are developed and implemented; investigating the aims and motives behind policies; and identifying the potential areas of intervention in order to improve the policy process in both its development and implementation stages.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415778312
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	07/22/2009
Series:	Routledge Contemporary South Asia Series , #18
Pages:	206
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Vandana Asthana teaches international politics in the Department of Government at Eastern Washington University, USA. Her previous publications include: Politics of the Environment; India’s Foreign Policy and Sub Continental policy; Theory of International Politics and two co-edited volumes Security in South Asia: Trends and Directions and Advances in Environmental Biopollution. She is the Founder member of the IC Centre for Governance, New Delhi, and the Founder Secretary and Member Advisory Panel of "Eco-Friends", an NGO working on water issues in India. She has served as consultant and completed a project for the Government of India on the Water Security and is a Board member of the South Asian Studies Association.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction 2. Changing The Frame: Repositioning Policy 3. The Process Of Economic Liberalization And Private Sector Participation 4. Water In The Liberalization Process 5. Situating Delhi In The Water Reform Project 6. Mainstreaming Policy: Discourses Of Power 7. Creating Spaces For Change: Collective Action On The Water Reform Project 8. Understanding The Water Policy Process