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Poor people confront the state on an everyday basis all over the world. But how do they see the state, and how are these engagements conducted? This book considers the Indian case where people's accounts, in particular in the countryside, are shaped by a series of encounters that are staged at the local level, and which are also informed by ideas that are circulated by the government and the broader development community. Drawing extensively on fieldwork conducted in eastern India and their broad range of expertise, the authors review a series of key debates in development studies on participation, good governance, and the structuring of political society. They do so with particular reference to the Employment Assurance Scheme and primary education provision. Seeing the State engages with the work of James Scott, James Ferguson and Partha Chatterjee, and offers a new interpretation of the formation of citizenship in South Asia.

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Participation' has become an essential part of good developmental practice for Southern governments, NGOs and international agencies alike. In this article we reflect critically on this shift by investigating how a 'participatory' development programme -India's Employment Assurance Scheme (EAS) -intersects with poor people's existing social networks. By placing the formalized process of participation in the EAS within the context of these varied and uneven village-level relationships, we raise a number of important issues for participatory development practice. We note the importance of local power brokers and the heterogeneity of 'grassroots' (dis)empowerment, and question ideas of power reversals used within the participatory development literature.

This article examines the operation of Kudumbashree, the Poverty Eradication Mission for the Indian State of Kerala. Kudumbashree operates through female-only Neighbourhood Groups, which aim to contribute to their participants' economic uplift, and to integrate them with the activities and institutions of local governance. As such, Kudumbashree echoes poverty alleviation programmes elsewhere in the Global South designed to link poverty alleviation to 'active citizenship'. This article evaluates the programme, looking in turn at its impacts on women's participation in public space, its attempts to engineer participatory citizenship through engagement with the local state, and the wider consequences of its particular linking of participation and poverty alleviation for processes of exclusion within Kerala. It argues that although the programme has undoubtedly been successful in its scale and in supporting women's public participation, questions remain over both the autonomy of the 'invited spaces' it has created, and the underlying vision of poverty alleviation it embodies.

The growing emphasis on affordable housing and the increase in its supply in Indian cities is characterised by two features that diminish the integrative role of affordable urban housing. The first is the move toward constructing new housing stock rather than upgrading existing stock. Second, most of this new housing, increasingly in the form of multi-storied tenement buildings, is located on urban peripheries in isolated or poorly connected sites. In focusing on the peripheralisation of formal low-income housing, this paper adds a new dimension to studies of peripheral urbanisation in India, which have hitherto focused on high-end speculative developments or informal settlements of the poor. Drawing on mixed-method field studies of four formal low-income settlements in Ahmedabad and Chennai, this paper argues that their residents experience a multifaceted dynamic of disconnection from the city and from other peripheral developments, rendering them outsiders in the periphery. Three dynamics of disconnection are studied: first, the allocation of fully built housing disconnects residents from processes of housing production. Second, spatial dislocation constrains their physical and socioeconomic mobility. Third, these dynamics combined with substandard infrastructural conditions alienate residents from the settlements and curtail their engagement in processes of place-making or the production of neighborhoods.

Expanded state-subsidised housing programmes in middle-income countries raise questions about the displacement and socio-spatial marginalisation of poor households. Examining these questions through people's experiences of resettlement indicates the importance of mobility to their lives. Drawing on a mixed-method comparative study of Ahmedabad, Chennai and Johannesburg, we ask: How does the relocation of low-income households to urban peripheries reshape the links between their physical and socio-economic mobility, and how does this impact on their ability to build secure urban futures? Experiences of families moving to five peripheral settlements indicate two linked challenges to the social and economic mobility of the peripheralised urban poor: first, their immediate and individual ability to be mobile within the city and second, the longer-term social mobility of their households. While trajectories towards secure urban citizenship for all remain a policy aspiration, housing policies and practices are placing this on hold or even reversing this, with mobility constraints locking many low-income groups into marginality. Introduction: Peripheral relocation and (Im)mobilityMany cities in middle-income countries are witnessing significant expansions in the production of state-subsidised housing, at a scale that is relocating millions of people. Their promise is to deliver housing, infrastructure and services that meet universal standards of decency and sustainable human settlements and, at the same time, to replace informal tenure arrangements, services, and governance with legible and governable urban environments (Patel, 2016). The danger is that delayed or partial 2021 the Author(s). Published by informa uK Limited, trading as taylor & Francis group.