Document Abstract
Published:
2001
Taking the State to court
The court’s role in changing the political system
This book deals with the concepts of good governance and related issues concerning the relationship between state and society, and specifically the viability of representative democracy.
The question debated in current development studies is whether such value-based concepts can be applied to developing countries. The author says that they make sense in the Indian city of Calcutta where he studied two major cases of environmental litigation. The findings are, nevertheless, relevant in a larger context.
Calcutta’s urban society has an operational ‘civil society’ - people enjoy and use political freedoms to form non-governmental organisations, which are making efforts to check and balance government action. However, this activist civil society is too weak to actually control the government and effectively limit its powers. This lack of trust reflects a malfunctioning administrative structure government appears to be unreliable and unaccountable and does not adequately implement its own legislation. Policy statements are often no more than propaganda.In this context, the author calls for greater transparency may improve both government performance and legitimacy. It may give rise to a minimum level of public trust.
In the particular setting of Calcutta, the judiciary has become a forum that can, to a certain extent, provide such transparency. Public interest litigation (in which agents of civil society sue the government) does permit some access to the wielders of state power and, accordingly, a minimum level of scrutiny of their doings. Courtrooms can thus become the location of a rudimentary ‘public sphere’, defined here as the arena in which civil society and state interact in a rational, critical and rule-bound rather than merely hierarchical discourse.
The author’s findings in Calcutta suggest that government shortcomings in this specific urban context are not best explained as results of a segmented, semi-feudal society, unready for a liberal constitution. Rather, it is the institutional framework of a quasi-authoritarian, postcolonial administration that does not allow the participation of an assertive civil society in policy matters.
If Indian democracy is to be strengthened, the author concludes, state agencies will have to become responsible and cooperative actors in the public sphere.
The question debated in current development studies is whether such value-based concepts can be applied to developing countries. The author says that they make sense in the Indian city of Calcutta where he studied two major cases of environmental litigation. The findings are, nevertheless, relevant in a larger context.
Calcutta’s urban society has an operational ‘civil society’ - people enjoy and use political freedoms to form non-governmental organisations, which are making efforts to check and balance government action. However, this activist civil society is too weak to actually control the government and effectively limit its powers. This lack of trust reflects a malfunctioning administrative structure government appears to be unreliable and unaccountable and does not adequately implement its own legislation. Policy statements are often no more than propaganda.In this context, the author calls for greater transparency may improve both government performance and legitimacy. It may give rise to a minimum level of public trust.
In the particular setting of Calcutta, the judiciary has become a forum that can, to a certain extent, provide such transparency. Public interest litigation (in which agents of civil society sue the government) does permit some access to the wielders of state power and, accordingly, a minimum level of scrutiny of their doings. Courtrooms can thus become the location of a rudimentary ‘public sphere’, defined here as the arena in which civil society and state interact in a rational, critical and rule-bound rather than merely hierarchical discourse.
The author’s findings in Calcutta suggest that government shortcomings in this specific urban context are not best explained as results of a segmented, semi-feudal society, unready for a liberal constitution. Rather, it is the institutional framework of a quasi-authoritarian, postcolonial administration that does not allow the participation of an assertive civil society in policy matters.
If Indian democracy is to be strengthened, the author concludes, state agencies will have to become responsible and cooperative actors in the public sphere.
