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Village Councils (village + council)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	50%

Selected Abstracts

Women as Policy Makers: Evidence from a Randomized Policy Experiment in India

ECONOMETRICA, Issue 5 2004
Raghabendra Chattopadhyay
This paper uses political reservations for women in India to study the impact of women's leadership on policy decisions. Since the mid-1990's, one third of Village Council head positions in India have been randomly reserved for a woman: In these councils only women could be elected to the position of head. Village Councils are responsible for the provision of many local public goods in rural areas. Using a dataset we collected on 265 Village Councils in West Bengal and Rajasthan, we compare the type of public goods provided in reserved and unreserved Village Councils. We show that the reservation of a council seat affects the types of public goods provided. Specifically, leaders invest more in infrastructure that is directly relevant to the needs of their own genders. [source]

Local governance and water resource management: experiences from Northern Namibia

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION & DEVELOPMENT, Issue 3 2008
Farhad Hossain
Abstract Like many semi-arid countries in Africa, Namibia has been experiencing water shortage for a long period of time. Prior to its independence in 1990, most of Namibia's water points,namely, the boreholes,served white-Namibians (about 7% of the national population of predominantly German descent) and their commercial farming areas. But their water needs have been satisfied at the expense of those indigenous Namibians and their communal areas (where some 80% of the national population originates). Independence, however, brought with it a new hope for the indigenous population: since 1990, the government has been working diligently to reform the country's local governance, and make local government agencies more effective, efficient and responsive to common people and their needs. This article sheds light on how, within the background of the government's decentralisation efforts, the management and distribution of water resources have changed in an independent Namibia, reporting findings from research conducted in a newly emerged village council in the north of the country. Drawing on historical and contemporary practices, we describe and analyse the role of decentralised local government in water resource management in northern Namibia, where today, more than 50% of the national population (i.e. the indigenous Oshiwambo-speaking people) resides. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

Non,Market Interventions in Water,Sharing:Case Studies from West Bengal, India

JOURNAL OF AGRARIAN CHANGE, Issue 4 2002
Vikas Rawal
This paper deals with two issues that are important areas of concern in the recent literature on water management in less,developed countries: forms of ownership of groundwater resources and alternatives to anarchy in the exploitation and use of groundwater. The emergence of a market for irrigation water has been argued to have the potential to provide irrigation water to large numbers of small cultivators in developing countries. The development of free markets for water, however, has also been shown to be associated with the emergence of ,water,lords' and with contracts for the purchase and sale of water that are biased against the poor. By contrast, this paper presents two examples of viable non,market interventions in water,sharing , regulation of water markets by village councils and cooperative tubewell groups , from villages in West Bengal, India. These interventions both improved the efficiency of water,use and represented relatively equitable arrangements for water,sharing. [source]