Participatory Local Governance in Asian Cities: Invited, Closed or Claimed Spaces for Urban Poor?

摘要

在过去二十年中，包括印度在内的许多亚洲国家已经通过国家法律强制推行地方的参与式治理。有关亚洲城市的新兴研究显示，尽管有强大的国家推动力，地方层面的参与式治理在很大程度上仍然是无效的。我们在印度艾哈迈达巴德的研究结果表明，尽管与国家政府的政策强制性相比，州政府在地方政府的治理中引入参与途径的政策强制性弱一些，但是地方政府的做法更弱，这导致了参与途径的无效或缺失。在缺失参与途径的情况下，中产阶级成功地利用了行政区和区域以及电子政府、移动政府的执行层面，通过谈判的手段来实现他们的需求，穷人则依靠选出的代表，但这一经验在亚洲很多城市并没有引起广泛的共鸣。而在印度的其他城市，贫困人群已经成功地通过选举代表参与谈判来实现自己的需求。%In the past two decades, many Asian countries including India have mandated participatory local governance through national statutes. Emerging research on Asian cities shows that despite strong national mandates, the practice of participatory governance at local levels remains largely ineffective. Our research in Ahmedabad, India, shows that while the state government's policy mandate for invited spaces for participation in local governance is weak compared with the national government's policy mandate, the practice of participatory governance by the local government is even weaker, leading to ineffective or closed participatory spaces. In the absence of invited spaces, the middle class successfully uses the executive wing at the ward and zonal levels and e-governance and m-governance platforms to negotiate their needs, whereas the poor rely on the elected representatives, but with limited success, resonating the experience of many cities in Asia. While in other cities of India, the poor have successfully engaged with elected representatives through clientelism to negotiate their needs, in Ahmedabad, this platform is captured also by the elite middle class and offers little opportunity to the poor. In response to the denial of all invited spaces of engagement and the consequent implications on their lives, the poor mobilize to claim spaces for engagement with the state through judicial recourse. Although successful, claimed spaces of the poor are one-off mechanisms that close upon the end of the judicial process rather than culminate into permanent invited spaces for participation.