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This article presents a multidimensional account of the politics of resource extraction in two subnational regions of India in response to the question: what are the political conditions that facilitate extraction? Emerging from the same moment of state creation in 2000, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh are adjacent mineral‐rich states with similar demographic profiles and comparable levels of economic development. The authors argue that despite these similarities and India's highly centralized legislative framework for natural resource governance, the two states have developed distinctive 'extractive regimes' in the years since statehood, which contrast in important ways across three dimensions: political organization and history, institutional effectiveness, and the nature and management of social resistance. The article offers the first in‐depth, comparative account of how subnational territorial reorganization in India acts as a critical juncture enabling the formation of extractive regimes, which have also converged in important ways in recent years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experiences in the post-partition Indian subcontinent refute the conventional expectation that the ‘possession of citizenship enables the acquisition of documents certifying it’ [Jayal 2013. Citizenship and Its Discontents: An Indian History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 71]. Instead, identity papers of various types play a vital part in certifying and authenticating claims to citizenship. This is particularly important in a context where the history of state formation, continuous migration flows and the rise of right-wing majoritarian politics has created an uncertain situation for individuals deemed to be on the ‘margins’ of the state. The papers that constitute this special issue bring together a range of disciplinary perspectives in order to investigate the history, politics and materiality of identity documents, and to dismantle citizenship as an absolute and fixed notion, seeking instead to theorise the very mutable ‘hierarchies’ and ‘degrees’ of citizenship. Collectively they offer a valuable lens onto how migrants, refugees and socio-economically marginal individuals negotiate their relationship with the state, both within South Asia and in South Asian diaspora communities. This introduction examines the wider context of the complex intersections between state-issued identity documents and the nature of citizenship and draws out cross-cutting themes across the papers in this collection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the case of a community of Bengali immigrant settlers along the coast of Odisha in India at the centre of a unique citizenship controversy. Families have arrived here gradually over the years since 1947, and have generally acquired a range of identity documents from Indian state agencies. These documents certify to a range of rights that signal social and political participation within India: land ownership, voting rights and the receipt of official welfare subsidies. With little warning, a 2005 order by the state government following a high court directive led to the production of a list of 1551 persons, declaring such persons as ‘infiltrators’. The list ostensibly comprises those who have entered India illegally after 1971 or born to parents who entered illegally. While no deportation, as originally intended, has taken place, the nullification of their various documents of citizenship has created a void in their lives. This paper examines the wider politics of the case, especially focusing on how those with nullified documents negotiate the authority of the local state and actors within their own society, and what this reveals about the ever contested nature of citizenship in post-partition India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical inquiry into the relationship between natural hazards and disasters has raised pressing questions about the uneven exposure and resilience of different social groups. This paper argues that human-induced climate change and its implication in a range of extreme events extends and complicates the pursuit of justice in the context of differentiated vulnerability to hazards. But the challenge of living with natural hazards can provoke and inspire the idea of global environmental justice in other ways. Sustained consideration of the unpredictability of physical environments draws us into engagement with the temporality and spatiality of earth processes. It points to the ways that any extended place-based inhabitation must involve demanding accommodations to environmental uncertainty - raising questions about how to 'do justice' to these achievements. Confronting forms of hardship that are triggered by the dynamics of the earth itself can also be taken as a prompt to conceive of environmental justice not only in regard to what others deserve or are entitled to, but in terms of what might be offered simply in response to their suffering. In this way, the paper proposes, thinking through natural hazard and disaster might play a part in re-imagining the very concept of environmental justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Governance is becoming increasingly important in development and poverty reduction policies. However, the forms and methods by which it is to be incorporated into donor programs are only emerging at present. In this paper, we contrast two very different approaches—the White House led Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) and DFID’s Drivers of Change (DOC) Approach—to analyzing governance, and compare their theoretical underpinnings. A key factor explaining why these different approaches have been adopted is that for the United States, global poverty reduction is a footnote to its foreign policy and national security agenda, whereas in the United Kingdom, global poverty reduction engages both the national political leadership and the civil society. In conclusion, the paper suggests that enduring contradictions confronted by all donors complicate the treatment of governance in empirically nuanced terms (as DOC attempts to do) while privileging a more universalistic approach like the MCA. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article investigates the rationale and implications of creating non-elected community-based bodies for India's national watershed development programme in 1994. A discourse of depoliticisation is in use to justify the creation of 'apolitical' watershed committees in contrast to 'political' panchayats, ostensibly unsuitable for participatory development for their embodiment of political contestation and vested interests. The discourse masks conflicts between key actors in India's development process and is highly malleable, acquiring pertinent meanings in specific contexts. Case-study evidence from two project villages in a south Indian district shows that the attempt to depoliticise this programme of panchayat politics fails, but sets up the ground for depoliticisation of another sort, by distancing watershed project spaces from pro-poor progressive politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article responds to a recently made proposition that development policy does not drive practice but, instead, that practice produces policy, with key actors striving to maintain coherent representations of it. This proposition is used to examine the translation of the national policy for participatory Watershed Development in India into concrete procedures at the district level and, ultimately, the practices that follow to sustain them. While uncovering a definite chain of ‘upward’ representations in the relationship between practice and policy, this article discovers a striking disjuncture in the stakes of those who formulate the policy and all those who implement it, even in upholding a formal commitment to participation as the new authorised policy. This article demonstrates how participation actually works as a rhetorical state strategy in the face of widespread incredulity, with seriously impairing effects for equity as a policy objective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a case study of two watershed development projects in Kurnool district of Andhra Pradesh in India, this article argues that participatory development projects are legitimized by using formalistic compliance criteria, while removing politics as a context. It shows how key aspects of the liberal political framework have not been fully harmonized with communitarian theories; the result is an interpretation of participation as a set of practices that are far removed from politics. As a development practice, participation can turn into the itemizing of participatory objectives, which are then to be fulfilled in the same way as physical and financial targets. The practitioners see their role as merely ‘technocratic’ and the projects they implement as ‘apolitical’. The author argues that, central to these claims, is a limited definition of ‘politics’ as a one dimensional domain comprising contest and irreconcilable conflict, from which the participatory projects, based on so-called consensus, publicly expressed, are to be shielded. The article concludes that participatory projects accommodate and reflect existing relations of domination and control much more than their outward orientation would suggest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Why do two poor states within India prioritize welfare differently? • Both are newly created smaller states so statehood alone cannot explain differences. • Neither has social mobilization tied to programmatic cadre based parties. • Nature of political competition can prompt the leadership to act for development. • State capacity can be put to developmental uses in these conditions. The idea of state responsibility for ensuring food security has gained ground, with strong popular mobilizations for the Right to Food around the world; but important variations prevail, both in the articulation of demands around food security interventions and in political responses to these. This paper takes a close look at India's Public Distribution System (PDS), a program with a long history and clear national-level, legislative backing, but considerable differences in prioritization at the subnational level. We focus on the unique paired comparison of Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, both amongst the poorest regions in India and the world which share the same moment of state creation in 2000 and ask why the opportunities afforded by statehood allowed Chhattisgarh to politically prioritize the PDS, but not Jharkhand. The paper finds that the explanation lies in the interrelated dimensions of political-electoral competition, the nature of pressures exerted by influential societal groups, and the developmental orientation of the political leadership and its enablement of bureaucratic capacity. This paper contributes to the emerging literature on the political conditions that allow the deployment of state capacity for the promotion of welfare in emerging welfare states. In doing so, the paper also seeks to advance the repertoire of conceptual tools available for understanding the expansion of social policy in varied institutional contexts across the Global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It concludes with a postscript by Jesse Ribot and Nancy Peluso, reflecting on this special issue and I A Theory of Access i 15 years after its publication. Also in subsequent works, Peluso is concerned with resource access and property, e.g. in her analysis of property rights dynamics of fruit trees in West Kalimantan (Peluso [11]). Thus, reading of Ribot and Peluso ([14]) can be productively combined with reading of Ribot ([13]) especially because the latter provides the rich empirical details and examples that the more conceptual piece, Ribot and Peluso ([14]), understandably could not. By emphasizing property established through law, custom and convention, Ribot and Peluso incorporate the notion of legal pluralism and forum shopping (von Benda-Beckmann and von Benda-Beckmann 1999); and that property relations are often ambiguous and contested. [Extracted from the article]

The Pongola River Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation (PRESPA) project quantified the economic benefits accuring to different livelihood sectors from the water resources of the Pongola floodplain, South Africa. The floodplain carries a diverse economy and ecology which is supported by flood events that once occured naturally but are now regulated by an upstream dam. PRESPA modelled the eco-hydrology which underpins various ecosystem services to determine how this might be managed to alleviate poverty. A model was used to quantify the economic value of the available water, especially the value accruing to the poor. This model linked to three development scenarios to explore trade-offs and outcomes of (1) a status quo, ‘unstructured’ economy; (2) a structured diverse economy; and (3) a structured ‘single sector’ agricultural economy. This model gives decision makers a measure of where water is best used in terms of poverty alleviation and enables them to examine future economic and ecosystem trajectories. In summary, poor households on the floodplain currently have a diversity of income and food sources, making them less vulnerable to economic and climatic shocks, while there is a trend towards intensive agriculture which may deliver higher returns but with greater costs and increased vulnerability. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article contributes to our understanding of transboundary environmental management regimes through the application of an analytical framework that facilitates an exploration of the co-existence of conflict and cooperation. Rather than framing conflict and cooperation as mutually exclusive states at opposite ends of a spectrum, we seek to understand the ways in which cooperation can exist at the same time as conflict. We apply this framework to a study of conservation management in a transboundary area at the intersection of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Uganda. We identify two actual and one hypothetical phase of conflict–cooperation relations, in a landscape notorious for some of the worst violence of the last two decades. We map the evolution of phases of transboundary protected area management against the evolving security context, and we find that this approach has greater explanatory power than previous approaches that polarize conflict and cooperation. In particular, it helps us to understand the drivers of environmental cooperation, including the evolving characteristics of that cooperation. This new way of understanding the relationship between environmental management and security also enables us to reconsider the potential for environmental management to be instrumental in working towards interstate security objectives, for example through peace parks. We don’t find that the ‘low politics’ of environmental management should be seen as a predictable and manageable determinant of international relations. But an understanding of the coexistence of conflict and cooperation does also point to a more complex, non-linear relationship between low and high politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]