Study title

The project’s central research question was: to what extent do initiatives to make local governance more participatory enhance poor people's opportunities for political empowerment? Looking at four rural field sites in West Bengal and Kerala, India, it examines poor people's use of the formal opportunities they have for participation within the local state. This ‘invited participation’ is examined within the context of the social relations reproducing poverty and marginalisation, and informal structures of authority and power, both of which reshape governance reforms away from their intended practice. The data available for archiving comes from two distinct groups of research participants; those implementing participatory initiatives within the local state (including civil servants, political leaders and community activists); and marginalised communities themselves. Both were subjects of in-depth qualitative interviews (in Bengali/Malayalam) with a field team that was located within the research areas for a period of 8 months. Transcription and translation is of mixed quality, so the research team has largely worked with the original audio voice recordings in West Bengal. Copies of the original audio files of all interviews have been archived with both project partner institutions (Centre for Development Studies, Trivandrum and Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta). The materials remain a rich source for the research team, but detached from their proper context their value to third-party researchers is uncertain. In addition, a short questionnaire was conducted with every household in three wards of each of the four local councils (panchayats) of the study. This provides a micro-level snapshot of some basic poverty indicators within the four field sites, and was constructed to contextualise the qualitative field materials. This data could not be used to generalise about conditions at scales above the fieldsites themselves – for example, making...