Empowerment of Women<i>Panchayat</i>Members: Learning from Kerala (India)

Chathukulam, Jos; John, Maria Sindhura

doi:10.1080/12259276.2000.11665894

Cited by 16 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 1 publication

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“…For municipal elections, parties generally seek out locals with strong social reputations in their ward and then assist them with the support needed to run a successful campaign (Bhalotra, Clots-Figueras, and Iyer 2018). Only 16% of candidates across these municipal corporations were elected as independents without a party affiliation in 2017, which is similar to trends observed elsewhere in India (Chathukulam and John 2000). 14…”

Section: Party Restrictionssupporting

confidence: 78%

Quotas as Opportunities and Obstacles: Revisiting Gender Quotas in India

Turnbull

2019

Pol & Gen

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This article addresses the empirical uncertainty regarding whether gender quotas establish a foundation of political representation and experience that encourages female candidates to compete against men. It updates and expands existing empirical research by contributing an analysis of the most recent electoral data across four municipal corporations in India over two election cycles. Critical questions on the theoretical expectation that gender quotas should encourage and enable women politicians to compete in open-gender contests over time are considered. The Indian quota system has not encouraged women to broadly compete outside the quota at the local level but has made some wards more likely to elect women. Parties also continue to resist nominating women outside the quota but are more likely to do so in wards previously represented by a woman. Finally, the unique overlap of gender and community quotas can discourage incumbency by essentially blocking incumbents from running again in their ward due to shifting community requirements.

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Section: Party Restrictionssupporting

confidence: 78%

Quotas as Opportunities and Obstacles: Revisiting Gender Quotas in India

Turnbull

2019

Pol & Gen

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“…The committee recognised the importance of the right to information, provided for citizen's charters, recommended the formation of a local government ombudsman and tribunal, suggested the strengthening of Gram Sabha and increased its frequency, among others. The committee was uncritically influenced by the methodology and practices of decentralised planning, which were initiated before the committee actually started functioning (Chathukulam and John, 1998). the local bodies are very little. The centre is left out of the decentralisation discourse in India and the onus of decentralisation squarely rests on the states.…”

Section: Truncated Decentralisationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring decentralisation: the case of Kerala (India)

John

Chathukulam²

2003

Public Admin & Development

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Attempts at measuring decentralisation are still in an underdeveloped stage. The reason for this lies in the failure to devise common standards against which measurement is possible and the lack of consensus about the very meaning of decentralisation. An attempt to measure decentralisation was made by Vengroff and Ben Salem in the context of Tunisia nearly a decade ago. An expanded and adapted version of this model is used to measure decentralisation in Kerala using the same judgmental criteria that they used after involving a panel of nine experts. These experts had a fairly good understanding of the practice of decentralisation to score on the basis of the adapted criteria. An ideal form of decentralisation envisaged in this measurement exercise is devolution. It has been found that on a scale ranging between 0 and 5, the state of Kerala obtained a score of 2.00 in spite of the fact that the investment that the state had made in decentralisation has no parallels anywhere in the developing countries. Such a low score, despite the much publicised campaign for decentralisation, was due to the focus on planning rather than on decentralisation issues. Attempts to measure decentralisation will not only enable us to develop more contextually valid measures of decentralisation, but also contribute to the clarification of the concept of decentralisation, particularly by identifying aspects neglected hitherto.

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“…Despite its intentions to consider gender needs, the WCP has also fallen short in formulating practical and strategic gender-specific projects relevant at the local level. Assessing the effective participation of elected women representatives in local panchayats in a select district in Kerala, Chathukulam and John (2000) observed that even though most of the leaders had acquired knowledge and skills appropriate to elected office during a three-year period after assuming office, they had been unsuccessful in bringing about change in their spheres of action and had been subjected to patriarchal domination by male members of their political parties.…”

Section: Gender Mainstreaming In Kerala: a Critiquementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Critical studies of the engendering governance agenda of the state in Kerala have shown that women in the invited spaces of local governance did not use their positions as a springboard to move to higher levels of politics (Chathukulam & John, 2000). Relegating local governance to the realm of developmental activism rather than that of politics was tantamount to preventing women occupying leadership roles from further developing their political aspirations (Devika & Thampi, 2010).…”

Section: Invited Spaces In Governance and Beyondmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Experiment in Feminist Technology in Local Governance: Revisiting the Question of ‘Invited Spaces’ of Participation in Kerala

Thampi

Kawlra

2019

Review of Development and Change

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In this article, we foreground the potential for a space for collective deliberation and political subjectivities building among women leaders in local governance. We interrogate the Gramamukhya portal, which was initiated in 2011 and continued until 2015, as a democratic space to politicise the invited spaces of governance. Revisiting the question of women’s engagement in panchayati raj institutions in Kerala, we suggest that the practice of citizenship can become politically effective for women in governance if they use a platform that facilitates critical engagement from within and without the invited spaces of participation. This reflection becomes all the more significant given the contemporary political context of Kerala, where the women’s question is caught between developmentalist intentions of the state and right-wing political mobilisations at the grass-roots level.

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Empowerment of WomenPanchayatMembers: Learning from Kerala (India)

Cited by 16 publications

References 1 publication

Quotas as Opportunities and Obstacles: Revisiting Gender Quotas in India

Quotas as Opportunities and Obstacles: Revisiting Gender Quotas in India

Measuring decentralisation: the case of Kerala (India)

An Experiment in Feminist Technology in Local Governance: Revisiting the Question of ‘Invited Spaces’ of Participation in Kerala

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