Gender and public choice in rural India: can female leaders really influence local governance?

Abstract

With established quotas that formalise the presence of women in local governance in rural India, it remains unclear how women are shaping public decision-making in practice. This paper, based on a survey carried out in four female-led and two male-led local governance institutions in Himachal Pradesh, empirically analyses decision-making based on competing Public Choice models. Results indicate that Public Choice theories fail to accurately predict decision-making because they do not account for embedded norms of gendered labour division. Female leaders can be constrained in their policy-making by the gender congruence of certain political tasks. This paper suggests that in the case of female-congruent political domains, such as health and education, a Citizen–Candidate model might best predict female-led decision-making processes while in the case of male congruence, such as irrigation and land development, a Downsian model might prevail.

Keywords::

• women
• public choice
• rural development
• irrigation
• India

Notes

^1. Rainfed irrigation refers to farming practices that rely on rainfall for water while surface water irrigation denotes the use of rivers, streams or ponds and reservoirs to meet agricultural water needs.

^2. Bunds refer to retaining walls designed to prevent water flowing out of reservoirs or riverbeds during heavy storm events.

^3. Before interviews were carried out, each respondent had to consent to the ethical agreement as given by the enumerators. The agreement, previously approved by the Central University Research Ethics Committee of the University of Oxford, gave respondents an overview of the research aims and purposes and informed them of their rights as participants. Each interviewee consented to have their opinion used for the research, so long as anonymity was preserved.

^4. Himachal Pradesh has the greatest road density amongst the mountainous states of India. Despite its hilly topography, in 2011, the state had an average road density of 6995 km/million inhabitant, while the national average was 3130 km/million inhabitant (Government of India 2012).

^5. The Integrated Watershed Development Project is a World Bank sponsored program aimed at reducing rural poverty by improving agricultural productivity through the restoration and rehabilitation of eroded hills and degraded irrigation systems (World Bank 1999).

^6. In this study the vice-chair, or upa pradhan, was considered as ordinary PRI member.

^7. The statistical difference is calculated to the 10% significance.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alexandra M. Girard

Alexandra is a D.Phil. student at the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford. She graduated from the University of Nottingham in 2008 after completing, with distinction, an M.Eng. in Environmental Engineering. As part of her studies in Nottingham she spent a year at the Universitat de Girona in Spain where she developed an interest in water-related issues. She was involved in an innovative project to decontaminate water using organic waste from the Catalan wine industry. Once back at University of Nottingham for her final year, she applied this knowledge of bioremediation to a water issue of greater significance to humans: contamination of drinking water with arsenic in rural parts of Bangladesh. She focused her research on designing a simple and cheap device to treat groundwater using the seeds of a widely available tree, the Mollinga oleifera. She moved to the University of Oxford in 2008 to study the one-year M.Sc. in Water Science, Policy and Management and developed research interests in the social science side of water issues. After investigating, for her M.Sc. thesis, how religion, culture and history might have been predetermining factors in the use of water as a weapon of war in ancient civilisations, she grew interested in the socio-culturally embedded concepts of gender in water management. She remained at the University of Oxford to embark on doctoral research and investigated how current changes in canal management in northern India, with recent policies requiring the inclusion of women in decision-making and the labour force, might weigh against socio-culturally embedded gender norms and how they impact on irrigation development.