Paper short abstract:

It is in the backdrop of a rapidly neo-liberalising city that the proposed paper attempts to explore the 'new politics' that has emerged due to the entrenched performance of civil society in participatory urban governance models like that of 'Bhagidari' in the Indian megalopolis of Delhi.

Paper long abstract:

More often than not scholarship in the Global South tends to use structuralist lenses for conceptualising the ways in which power is brokered amongst the State and the citizenry in postcolonial urban contexts. Of particular usage is a neo-Gramscian 'Civil vs Political Society' essentialism that predicates a vocabulary of legality as the sole mode of negotiation. Working against such a framework, the present paper attempts to use Deleuzian lenses so as to make sense of what Lefebvre called, the differential spaces of power. The site of study herein is Bhagidari, a participatory urban governance model which has been in vogue in Delhi for over a decade now. In short, the Bhagidari initiative, is one that seeks to institutionalise the participation of Resident Welfare Associations (RWAs) through dialogic engagements with officials of various departments like that of Water, Electricity, Roads etc.

Based on empirical data obtained from longitudinal Case Studies, the key points of inquiry are into: (a) the new tensions that arise amongst the political class due to the entrenched performance of 'civil society' in the management of civic affairs and (b) the ways in which one makes sense of the non-economic circuits of power in postcolonial urban contexts. In doing so, the paper contends that such emergent practices put in place a liminal notion of citizenship whereby civil society is seen to operate neither in conjunction nor disjunction with the State. Rather it puts in place fluid spaces of, what I prefer to call as, In Situ Citizenship.