Constructing the (Neoliberal) Urban Agenda: How Political Actors Shaped India’s National Urban Renewal Mission

• In Event: 591 - Section on Community and Urban Sociology Paper Session. The Changing Face of Asian Cities: Toward New Theorizing

Abstract

Responding to pressures to address emerging urban problems while promoting economic growth in cities, in 2005 the Indian government unveiled its largest urban policy to date, the National Urban Renewal Mission (NURM). Under NURM provincial and city governments receive funds from the central government, and in exchange for these funds they must adopt a series of reforms for liberalizing urban economies, managing urban land markets, and decentralizing authority to municipalities. While the reforms within NURM mirror contemporary neoliberal urban policies found globally, the development of this policy has been complicated by historically-embedded political relations between the central government and provincial governments and between the rural and urban sectors. Despite a strong scholarly interest in understanding the emergence of certain kinds of urban policies and the institutional changes that occur under neoliberal urbanism, there is little inquiry into the role of political actors in determining the form of these neoliberal urban policies. In this paper, I argue that the development of NURM was far from an inevitable policy response to global economic forces. Rather, the ability of the central government to develop this neoliberal urban policy strongly depended upon on a complex process of coalition building and a legitimation of the central government’s role in urban affairs. Through analysis of interviews with NURM policy makers, civil society activists, and political officials conducted between 2012 and 2013, this paper elucidates the ways in which macro-structural economic processes are strongly shaped by political actors and deeply embedded constellations of power within a country.

Author

• Jamie Lynn McPike, Brown University