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Paper short abstract

Using Meghalaya’s SCEP reforms, this paper shows how centering wellbeing and decentralised governance enables frontline agency, cross-sector integration, and community co-production, offering an adaptive, equity-driven alternative to conventional development and social justice paradigms.

Paper long abstract

It has now been accepted in development discourse and practice that decentralized leadership and distribution of decision-making power across multiple levels of governance promotes ownership of development interventions amongst communities, adaptive problem solving and collaborative governance. This diffusion creates the structural and psychological spaces for grassroots agency, the capacity of individuals and communities to act intentionally, solve problems, and shape their own development trajectories.

This paper uses the case of state of Meghalaya, India, to explore how centering wellbeing and transforming bureaucratic systems into responsive, learning organisations, reconfigures development and social justice. Meghalaya’s flagship programme on maternal and child health, State Capability Enhancement Project (SCEP), introduced a mode of governance that redistributes decision-making power to local Medical Officers and community health workers to enable wellbeing-oriented reforms that transcended sectoral silos by integrating preventive, enabling, and curative pillars with social protection, nutrition, gender equity, and community capability. These reforms also position frontline actors as co-producers of knowledge and agents of innovation rather than passive implementers of central directives.

This cross-sectoral approach aligns with global calls for adaptive, participatory and equity-driven systems. It centers wellbeing as key pillar involving vulnerable and under-represented sections of the population like women, minorities, poor etc. Local councils and platforms like Self Help Groups enable these groups to voice to their concerns around public utilities and infrastructure and design local solutions. These solutions are effective, work on the democratic principles of feedback and accountability, and build trust in the systems.