Research Summary
Research Summary
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Inside the State: Bureaucratic Norms and Primary Education in Rural India (Book manuscript in progress)
When and how do poor democracies implement primary education effectively? India has earned accolades for its robust democracy. Yet the state’s historic failure to educate the masses has contributed to a poor record of human development. While India has made significant progress within the last two decades to expand school access and enrollment, policy implementation is still a major challenge as the quality of services remains poor and uneven across the country. This book analyzes the implementation of universal primary education in India. It advances a new theoretical argument that highlights the role of bureaucracy in public service delivery. Historical sources and interviews with policymakers at the national level reveal that India’s primary education policy was forged outside of the electoral arena by a coalition of committed bureaucrats. In the decades leading up to economic liberalization, committed bureaucrats worked below the political radar, gradually developing a national education policy. They accelerated their efforts in the 1990s, drawing on international norms and networks to gain political support, which culminated in the enactment of India's universal primary education program in 2001. Policy implementation, meanwhile, remained under the administrative purview of state governments. Sub-national level fieldwork traces the implementation process within three carefully-selected states in the Hindi belt region of north India. Notwithstanding the same formal institutions and administrative structures, implementing agencies across these states operate according to distinct bureaucratic norms, unwritten rules that guide how officials behave and relate to citizens on the ground. Deliberative agencies, which foster collective problem-solving, are found to implement primary education more effectively, as they can adapt policies to suit local needs and elicit complementary input from citizens. Legalistic agencies, by contrast, promote the strict adherence to rules, procedures and organizational hierarchies, which makes them more responsive to official orders from above but less effective in addressing local needs in implementation. The findings for this book draw on more than two years of field research in rural India, including 500 interviews and focus group discussions with state officials, civic agencies, parents and school teachers, along with participant observation inside local state agencies and village-level ethnography. While previous research has emphasized the role of electoral politics and the formal design of institutions, this book highlights the everyday norms and practices inside the state that influence policy implementation. In so doing, it helps advance our understanding of the mechanisms by which state agencies implement services effectively on behalf of the poor.
When and how do poor democracies implement primary education effectively? India has earned accolades for its robust democracy. Yet the state’s historic failure to educate the masses has contributed to a poor record of human development. While India has made significant progress within the last two decades to expand school access and enrollment, policy implementation is still a major challenge as the quality of services remains poor and uneven across the country. This book analyzes the implementation of universal primary education in India. It advances a new theoretical argument that highlights the role of bureaucracy in public service delivery. Historical sources and interviews with policymakers at the national level reveal that India’s primary education policy was forged outside of the electoral arena by a coalition of committed bureaucrats. In the decades leading up to economic liberalization, committed bureaucrats worked below the political radar, gradually developing a national education policy. They accelerated their efforts in the 1990s, drawing on international norms and networks to gain political support, which culminated in the enactment of India's universal primary education program in 2001. Policy implementation, meanwhile, remained under the administrative purview of state governments. Sub-national level fieldwork traces the implementation process within three carefully-selected states in the Hindi belt region of north India. Notwithstanding the same formal institutions and administrative structures, implementing agencies across these states operate according to distinct bureaucratic norms, unwritten rules that guide how officials behave and relate to citizens on the ground. Deliberative agencies, which foster collective problem-solving, are found to implement primary education more effectively, as they can adapt policies to suit local needs and elicit complementary input from citizens. Legalistic agencies, by contrast, promote the strict adherence to rules, procedures and organizational hierarchies, which makes them more responsive to official orders from above but less effective in addressing local needs in implementation. The findings for this book draw on more than two years of field research in rural India, including 500 interviews and focus group discussions with state officials, civic agencies, parents and school teachers, along with participant observation inside local state agencies and village-level ethnography. While previous research has emphasized the role of electoral politics and the formal design of institutions, this book highlights the everyday norms and practices inside the state that influence policy implementation. In so doing, it helps advance our understanding of the mechanisms by which state agencies implement services effectively on behalf of the poor.