Governance

This manual published by Society for Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA) aims at creating a basic understanding of the concept, principles and steps of community monitoring. This manual is based on the work that PRIA was involved in that included facilitating the process of social development and monitoring, and for guiding the process of developing models for community monitoring linked to community action, for child survival and development in six project sites in India. Read More

This report by the World Bank Institute describes the Kerala Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Project and the efforts made by the Government of India to revolutionise sanitation services in the state of Kerala, with the aim of improving public health. Earlier experience had shown that significant governance problems had hindered water and sanitation reforms in local and national programmes in the state.

Challenges to reform included a lack of accountability and transparency, corruption, which made sanitation and hygiene problems more difficult to solve and accelerated the spread of infectious diseases throughout densely populated Kerala. It was also found that corruption affected all the sections of the population, particularly the poor and the marginalised. Read More

This paper published in the Integral Leadership Review discusses the Tamil concept of 'koodam' as a possible tool to transform bureaucratic structures into more non hierarchical and people friendly structures. The paper argues that hierarchy and bureaucracy are two of the most common features of governance systems that play a determining role in shaping the organisational culture, systemic response and human relations that prevail in government institutions.

Thus, the more rigid and formal the hierarchy, the greater is the consciousness of status and authority that in turn creates closed human relations systems dominated by feelings of suspicion, formalism and a discomfort with anything ‘personal’. Bureaucracy, or rule boundedness, determines how open the organisation is, not just vis-à-vis the outside world, but even inside the government system itself, encompassing relations between and amongst different sub-systems or departments.Read More

This study by Udayvani and Arghyam describes the findings of case studies undertaken by Udaywani to get a clear picture of the drinking water and toilet facilities in 8 Gram Panchayats of the 6 Districts of Karnataka following the ASHWAS survey conducted by Arghyam that included a survey of Household Water and Sanitation in 172 Gram Panchayats across 28 districts of Karnataka (all except Bangalore Urban). Read More