Governments across the Global South have decentralized a degree of power to municipal authorities. Are local officials sufficiently knowledgeable about how to execute their expanded portfolio of responsibilities? Past studies have focused on whether citizens lack the requisite information to hold local officials accountable. We instead draw on extensive fieldwork and a novel survey of small-town politicians in India to show that local officials themselves have distressingly low levels of procedural knowledge on how to govern. We further show that procedural knowledge shapes the capabilities of officials to represent their constituents, and that asymmetries in knowledge may blunt the representative potential of these bodies. Finally, we show that winning office does not provide an institutionalized pathway to knowledge acquisition, highlighting the need for policy-based solutions. Our findings demonstrate the importance of assessing knowledge deficits among politicians, and not only citizens, to make local governance work.

Who Knows How to Govern? Procedural Knowledge in India's Small Town Councils

Speaker: Dr. Adam Auerbach (Johns Hopkins)

Moderator: Dr.  Umair Javed (LUMS)

Date: 6th May 2024

Time: 6PM PKT

Live Stream Link: https://rb.gy/brbprb

Dr. Adam Auerbach (Speaker):

Adam Auerbach is an Associate Professor in the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses on local governance, urban politics, and the political economy of development, with a regional focus on South Asia and India in particular. He is the author of Demanding Development: The Politics of Public Goods Provision in India's Urban Slums (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and co-author of Migrants and Machine Politics: How India's Urban Poor Seek Representation and Responsiveness (Princeton University Press, 2023). During the 2022-2023 academic year, Auerbach was a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow at the World Bank.

Dr. Umair Javed (Moderator):

Umair Javed is Assistant Professor of Politics and Sociology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). He completed his PhD in political sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where his dissertation looked at the impact of economic liberalization and informalization on democratization, labour relations, and political participation in Pakistan’s largest province, Punjab. Broadly, his research interests include urban politics, state-society relations, and socio-economic change in South Asia.