Paper short abstract:

The paper highlights the limitations of the state in claiming legitimacy and success in development scheme. Through the example of a slum redevelopment scheme in Mumbai, the paper claims the important role of transversalities in making the policy 'real'.

Paper long abstract:

The paper presents the important role of negotiations as well as contentions in policy translation within global South. Li (1999, cited in Mosse 2004, p.645), for instance, highlights that "since success is fragile and failure, a political problem, hegemony has to be worked out not imposed; it is 'a terrain of struggle' (ibid.; p.316)". With a specific focus on the scale of community, the paper discusses the implementation of the Basic Services for the Urban Poor (BSUP) scheme in Kalyan-Dombivli (KD), a sub-city to Mumbai, India. The BSUP scheme was implemented in the KD city during the 2005-2017 period. The analysis draws from semi-structured interviews with the settlers across two settlements that took part in the scheme as well other key actors in the scheme. The paper finds that the implementing agency i.e. the local government in KD, engages a variety of actors and mobilizes a variety of things in making the policy 'real'. These actors use meaningful narratives for generating interests amongst the slum settlers regarding the scheme. However, at the scale of community, the settlers engage in the scheme in often transversal ways (Holston, 2008). Such transversalities are best captured under the dualities of collaboration-compromises (involving negotiations between the state/ its agencies and the policy subjects) and repression-contention (acts of contentious politics by the policy subjects challenging the state's policy model). The transversalities that surfaced in making the BSUP scheme real, highlight the limitations of the state in claiming legitimacy and success in the scheme.