Water, Democracy and Neoliberalism in India: The Power to Reform

Since the early 1990s, the achievement of ‘good governance’ has been a dominant discourse in the pursuit of social and economic development. This book presents a critical challenge to the contemporary development paradigm of good governance.

Based on original ethnographic fieldwork on urban water governance reforms in south India (Karnataka), the book examines the two propositions that underlie the current good governance debate. The first refers to a claim that good governance is both democ...