Paper short abstract:

The protection of "natural areas" is today an important factor of people displacement on behalf of "development'". The case of the Sanjay Gandhi National Park, Mumbai, illustrates how too binary models such as nature vs. city, or bourgeois environmentalism vs. needs of the poor, must be qualified

Paper long abstract:

The displacement of people due to "development" is far from being only a matter of mines, dams and the like, taking place in far-off rural or forested areas; it also happens in cities. Displacements resulting from urban transportation infrastructure projects as well as "mega-events" are well known. Many displacements also occur on behalf of the environment, notably for protecting natural areas from so-called "urban sprawl".

At first glance, the Sanjay Gandhi National Park, located within the 20 million inhabitant megalopolis of Mumbai, would appear to support the view that nature may be the victim of uncontrolled urban growth, in particular of slums that have invaded the park. There, middle- and upper-class environmental activists fight for the total removal of the slums. This can be described as a classic case of the "bourgeois environmentalism" (Baviskar 2002; Véron 2006) that is growing in emerging countries where an expanding elite is demanding green areas and living standards similar to those of developed countries.

At second glance, however, the situation is shown to be more complex. For instance, certain "environmentalists" clandestinely work for another "development", real estate based. The slum dwellers' advocates are often products of the same social background as their enemies. And "conservation sprawl" should be added to "urban sprawl", since the expansion of protected areas creates socio-spatial conflicts that are multiplied by an urban "branding" effort to create an iconic park, emblematic of Mumbai's new rank in the race to become a "global city".

Paper short abstract:

When considering urbanisation and urban development, the transport sector needs to be attributed a quintessential role. In this sector space is constantly being reconfigured and re-negotiated. This case study of Dhaka provides a crucial and paradigmatic case study on urban economic governance.

Paper long abstract:

From a governance angle, the transport sector is one of the core sectors of controlling and reconfiguring urban space. At the same time, it is also a sector where (re-)negotiations between the different stakeholders and service providers are pronounced, and often these take place in the public sphere. Thus, we conceptualise Dhaka city as a site (or "arena") of contested space, where powerful stakeholders aim at reconfiguring space and the rules for traffic according to their needs and power position, at the costs of less vocal and less connected urban groups, such as low income groups and politically marginalised sections of the population. Our case study first of all gives an overview of the nation transport policy and its various revision over the past decade. This includes a mapping of the core stakeholders, such as the Dhaka City Corporation or the various owners' associations who control the sector. Conceptionally, this is based on institutional (economic) theory (in terms of the "rules of the game") and governance

Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses driving factors behind the transformation of peri-urban Chennai from rural remoteness into a global manufacturing hub. Whether to create a Special Economic Zone or abandon agriculture – it is suggested that actors pursue spatial strategies to realize their interests.

Paper long abstract:

Peri-urban Chennai, India, is undergoing a profound transformation as different actors seek to realize their interests. Interests often couched in a vision of development. This paper intends to show in how far space is instrumental in doing so. Foremost, it is the state government of Tamil Nadu that since the 1990ies deploys the spatial instrument of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) to promote industrial development. SEZs are vast tax free zones, while often established against the will of local farmers they provide ideal investment sites for multinational corporations. In the wake of this process, other actors seize the opportunity to develop peri-urban spaces according to their interests and capacity to produce space: real-estate developers buy lands from farmers and sell to new residents attracted by modernist visions of the peri-urban; engineering colleges buy vast lands to educate; farmers stop farming to build residential space for the growing workforce.

To understand how space is instrumental for the different actors, Lefebvre's theory of the production of space will be applied. That is, space is conceptualized having a material aspect, a formal representation and an emotional vision attached to it, all open for manipulation. Actors use these aspects to forge unique spatial strategies using space as an instrument.

These spatial strategies were explored with interviews, analysis of government publications, newspapers reports and companies websites. Based on this, the paper will discuss how different visions of peri-urban development are realized on the ground by pursuing specific spatial strategies.

Paper short abstract:

This paper provides an analysis of the effects of aid on local structures and social networks in a southern Sri Lankan village, and shows how Sri Lankan elite have utilised development aid, following the tsunami of 2004, to further their local authority and redefine social boundaries and space.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyses the structure of social networks in a southern Sri Lankan community and the effects of development NGOs on local networks and structures following the tsunami of 26th December 2004. Due to the absence of official government representatives in the village, the 'dominant family network' represents the primary unit of political power and authority within the village. The tsunami brought with it a wave of aid and development agencies, where control of the distribution of aid was handed over to local elites from the neighbouring towns. Apart from the social transfiguration arising from the structural damage caused by the tsunami, I argue that the control of aid and its distribution by local elites resulted in the further transfiguration of social networks and local power structures. Aid is utilised by the elite as a political arm in the subjugation of villagers who form part of the lower class. Furthermore, the relocation of villagers to tsunami camps and tsunami villages further inland, part of a government ban on the building or repairing of houses within 100 metres of the coast, has forced locals to redefine their social networks and consequently the boundaries of their social space. By looking at a case study of an elite family from a neighbouring town who own a hotel in the village, I demonstrate how the family utilised development aid to facilitate the extension of their hotel, exert their authority over community members and redefine social boundaries and space.

Paper short abstract:

The Nepalese Arun-3 hydropower project was recently resumed by the Indian state-owned SJVN. As the project was initially developed by the World Bank in the 1990s and later cancelled, it is a telling example to trace the fundamental shifts in transnational infrastructure development.

Paper long abstract:

In 2008, the Nepalese government signed a memorandum of understanding with the Indian state-owned SJVN on the construction of the Arun-3 hydropower project. They agreed on a Build-Own-Operate-Transfer structure allocating 80 per cent of the energy generated to the foreign investor for 30 years.. Subsequently, the most controversial development project in the history of Nepal was resumed. Initially, construction had started in 1990, when the dam was to be financed mainly through a World Bank loan. But after an alliance of activists started a campaign against the project and filed a complaint to the Inspection Panel of the World Bank (the only one to date that proved successful), the international financial institution decided to withdraw from the project in 1995.

SJVN is the first Central Public Sector Undertaking to bag a dam project outside India on open competition basis. Currently, the corporation is surveying several dam sites in Bhutan, while other Indian companies have started developing projects in Nepal as well. But Chinese investors show interest in Nepal's strategic water resources as well. And while people in the Arun valley predominantly welcome the renewed interest in the dam, a substantial number of activists, hydropower experts, policy advisors and intellectuals in Kathmandu are anxious about the growing Indian influence and fear a gigantic sell-out of Nepal's energy options.

On that basis, my paper will investigate the fundamental shifts in transnational infrastructure development from a "Western" donor agency-driven state-centred model to new a private-public-partnership regime involving a whole set of "emerging" actors.

Paper short abstract:

Parallel to development projects run by the state, local actors promote their own version of development in tribal Jharkhand. This paper shall explore how three initiatives strategically use the term development, while merging it with the practice of a redefined tradition.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses differing approaches to development in tribal Jharkhand, based on recent fieldwork by two independent researchers.

The first section will focus on development through local actors, who, in Sahlins' (1992) sense of development, promote culture and develop it on a "bigger and better scale". Two groups are especially active in this field: The Santal Writers Association, who relates development directly to literacy; and All India Sarna Dhorom, another group with similar aims, but whose emphasis is on religion. In their statements and behaviour, its members merge tradition and development, condemning certain old practices as "underdeveloped", while redefining culture on their own terms. As these internal perspectives on development differ from the external, e.g. state run development programmes, it is relevant to examine the relations between the two. How do the above-mentioned local actors position themselves in regard to the state's discourse? Which conflicts arise in the interactions between the state, the activists and the population not involved in any of these development projects?

The second section will examine the relationship between local and hegemonic narratives of development through the work of the Sangh Parivar's Vanavasi Kalyan Kendra in Jharkhand. It will explore the role of internal and external actors, and the motivations of Sangh workers and beneficiaries of their projects. In particular, this section will focus on how these complex relationships are played out through the attempts of the VKK to create 'alternative publics' on the ground,inside of which notions of development are linked to the transformation of everyday religious practices.

Paper short abstract:

The proppsed paper examines the impact of rapid urban expansion on the fringe of Delhi, leading to the displacement of agricultural communities and villages in the post Partition scenario and the consequent effect on gender relations.

Paper long abstract:

The proposed paper intends to explore the dynamics of urban expansion in the post Partition capital city of Delhi and the consequent effect on gender relations. It moves around the central argument, that while the refugees of the India's Partition are generally seen as 'hapless victims' of the ethnic strife and hence in need of prompt rehabilitation by the state- and Delhi, the capital provided a 'safe haven' in terms of housing and work to refugees, yet behind the story of survival and refugee enterprise in Delhi is also hidden the tale of many hopeless villages and their land which witnessed tremendous displacement in an endeavour to re-settle the refugee population from Punjab, as new colonies were constructed all over Delhi. Hence, while Delhi is often seen as a 'Punjabi City' or a 'Partition city' as Punjabi refugees have a given it its present shape and character, yet what needs to be highlighted is the saga of indigenous villages inhabited by agrarian communities who were not passive recipients of the rapid urbanization. In particular, the indigenous communities of these areas reacted to the transition process (from rural to urban) and themselves changed from being a distinct agricultural based community to becoming both morphologically and economically part of the larger urban area. That in turn had significant affects on familial and gender relations with in these communities, and their interface with the urban world brought changes in work, life and livelihood.

Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to display the utilization of the idea and promise of development by state and non-state actors in order to further their territorial claims in the context of statehood movements in India.

Paper long abstract:

Statehood movements in India aim at redrawing political boundaries that define who exercises control over territories. Territory and control over it form focal points in the struggle over space and its organisation. In order to maintain or (re-)gain control over these claimed territories various state and non-state actors employ different strategies including the visible presentation of force e.g. in form of armed groups, or the appropriation of space through symbols such as flags and banners. This paper proposes that also the idea and promise of "development" as presented in the rhetoric of the conflicting actors is one main means to (re)gain control over the claimed territories. The district Darjeeling in northern West Bengal is such a contested space where the "Gorkhas" aim at the creation of a separate Union state "Gorkhaland". A two years long agitation led by one of the Gorkhaparties that drew on a boycott of taxes, the enforcement of strikes, and the violent silencing of political opponents has resulted in what some have called an "absence" of the state. The perceived "lack of development" thereby served as legitimation and mobilization strategy for the statehood demand. This paper focuses on the ways the West Bengal Government attempts to reenter this seemingly "state-less" space through the promise and rhetoric of development and how the creation of a developmental semi-autonomous body for the district and its projects are experienced on the ground, including the question about who the winners and losers of this promised "development" are.

Paper short abstract:

The paper will look into the normative amalgamation of modernization, development and democracy discourses in the context of the panchayati raj reform in India. It will address both, locales and routes through which knowledge is accessed, produced and dispersed as aspects of space reconfigured in the context of policy intervention.

Paper long abstract:

The paper will look into the normative amalgamation of modernization, development and democracy discourses in the context of the panchayati raj reform (73rd Amendment) in India. While the central government, despite a rhetoric of devolution, aims at increasing control over remote rural areas and seek to deliver development more efficiently, from the other end, the reform seems to offer new avenues to have a share of the development cake - not seldom a share for one's own pocket as well.

The paper, which focuses on the 33% women's quota entailed in the reforms, will make references to two different aspects of space. For one it looks at the actual physical space in which meanings of development are negotiated. It is argued that these locales (as varied as panchayat bhawans or matrimonial beds) are not a neutral container space, but that the meanings of such locales are socially constructed and re-negotiated under the exigencies of the panchayat reforms. The second aspect of space addressed refers to the networks and routes, i.e. the social spaces through which knowledge is accessed, produced and dispersed and how on the way a reform, couched in the language of democracy and development, gets translated into rural northern Indian realities of every day politics. The two aspects of space are then brought together with the argument that the social production of physical and social space concurrently play a central role in the negotiation of gender relations.