Pre-registration: A Conjoint Analysis of Community Governance and Leadership in three different slum types in Delhi, India.
This is a pre-registration document for our planned research in India
Background and explanation of rationale.
There is growing literature that examines the role of political brokers in developing democracies. There have been recent studies in India and Argentina to show slum leaders take up resident problems, themselves rooted and having a reputation within the slum community. This makes them attractive to political parties. Slum leaders offer a way for residents to broker goods and services within their community (Auerbach and Thachil, 2018; Paniagua, 2022). Much of the seminal work on slums and their informal leaders focused on cities in Latin America. Classic studies are Ray (1969), Cornelius (1975), Perlman (1976) and Stokes (1995) who study Caracas, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, and Lima respectively. Research also considers the presence of associational activity, where slum level councils provide a structure for informal governance. This has been shown to be the case in barrios in Venezuela (Ray, 1969) and in Peru and Ecuador where neighbourhood associations advance the security and welfare of local residents (Dosh, 2010). Development committees and associations in India’s slums have been found to be able to exert significant efforts to improve local conditions from within. They serve as valuable partners in development projects that build local capacities in quotidian governance (Auerbach, 2017). Professor Mark Pennington at King’s College London and the Centre for the Study of Governance and Society and the John Templeton Foundation funded project ‘The Ideal of Self Governance” considers circumstances where governance institutions arising from a ‘bottom-up’ or ‘polycentric’ process of evolution are better placed to cope with these constraints than a reliance on formal governments and centralised political authority (2013). Research around self-governance and community-based interest groups has also been undertaken around disaster management (Chamlee-Wright and Storr, 2009; Chamlee-Wright, 2010; Chamlee-Wright and Storr, 2011).
This research explores the emergence of brokers in different slum types in Delhi, India and how these brokers build a following from the local residents. This research will explore the characteristics that separate brokers from other residents in their neighbourhoods.
This research focuses on brokers as informal slum leaders. We seek to investigate the origins of hierarchy in clientelist spaces and study the processes through which informal leaders emerge within different slum types.
