Projects
Pushing and Pulling: Institutional Underpinnings of Energy Transitions in India and China
Rohit Chandra
Assistant Professor IIT-Delhi, School of Public Policy Visiting Fellow Centre for Policy Research
India and China are in the midst of what could be considered one of the most ambitious energy transitions in human history. As climate concerns grow, diplomatic pressures mount, and financial pressures harden, both countries are planning wholesale realignment of their energy systems over the next half-century, away from fossil fuels and towards more sustainable forms of energy.
Given the legacies and persistence of state-ownership in energy sectors, combined with incremental market reforms, there are many outstanding questions regarding where the impulses for this wholesale change will come from. Depending on the sector or the policy under consideration, the tools could be quite different, ranging from industrial policy and national carbon markets to preferential lending and consumer awareness campaigns. This project will look at a suite of energy policies in both India and China and trace back their intellectual origins to find the communities of practice, the sources of knowledge, the bureaucratic and political allies, and unexpected collaborators who helped in the success and/or failure of these energy policies. In the process, it will build a descriptive institutionalist narrative of what kinds of actors and institutions came together to push change in a particular energy sub-sector. This will add to the increasingly important and burgeoning literature on the comparative politics of energy reform in India and China.
Shifting Geographies of Expertise and Policymaking in Foreigner Management in the Time of (post-)COVID-19: A County-view from China
Ka-Kin Cheuk
Postdoctoral Fellow | Annette and Hugh Gragg Postdoctoral Fellow in Transnational Asian Studies | Chao Center for Asian Studies | Rice University
The global outbreak of COVID-19, which started in early 2020, has brought a sustained challenge to foreigner management (waiguoren guanli) in China. Unpredictable policy changes can be abruptly imposed on every local government office due to the pandemic.
Such policy uncertainty is also coupled with the ever-increasing pressure on centralizing human mobility control and digitizing pandemic governance across all levels of governments in China. The institutionalizing policy forces from above continue to reconfigure how local governments manage non-Chinese foreign populations on the ground. This project aims to unpack such ongoing reconfiguration through a case study of a Chinese county where local state players, non-state players, and foreign residents have been deeply entangled. Doing so will map out the shifting geographies of expertise and policymaking in foreigner management within the everyday settings of the local Chinese county in the (post-)pandemic time (i.e. 2021–2022).
Democratic Decentralization and Changing Locations of Knowledge Production for Health Policies: Community Engagement in Palliative Care
Thresia CU
Senior Fellow | Institute of Chinese Studies | Honorary Fellow | Institute of Public Health, Bangalore
Historically, in India, public policy discourses, particularly public health policies, rely heavily on technical expertise and bureaucracy with a top-down approach. A reified distinction between expert and lay knowledge leaves health policymaking mainly within the narrow perspectives of expertise which has implications for democracy and expert decisions.
In the Indian and Kerala (Indian state) contexts, such sidelining of lay knowledge masks the numerous deeply ingrained health inequalities of class, caste, gender, ethnicity, and beyond. Although these herald disturbing contours in Kerala’s health and social portrait, the state’s captivating political histories, including democratic decentralization and shifting demography and epidemiology, drove concomitant changes in the contour of the health policies. The formulation of the pain and palliative care policy (2007) exemplifies it as it was linked to the community-based palliative care movement of the mid-1990s, unlike policies for other diseases. Therefore, the study’s primary objective is to understand the shifting locations of knowledge for formulating health policy by analyzing the formulation of pain and palliative care policy in Kerala in the context of decentralization by employing primary and secondary data. The study uses an interdisciplinary theoretical frame largely adopted from critical medical anthropology and public health.
The “Expert Turn” in Participatory Policymaking in China
Ceren Ergenc
Associate Professor | Department of China Studies | Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University
Participatory policymaking in urban China has two goals: policy effectiveness through public consultation and government legitimacy through public representation. This research explores the impact of the “expert turn” in participatory policymaking on the self-empowerment of citizens (political efficacy) vis-à-vis local governments and the legitimacy of local governments in the eyes of city residents.
The research is based on three rounds of fieldwork-based qualitative data and two rounds of quantitative data collection. The multivariate analysis considers regional variations and the role of political networks, and the methodologies, including quantitative survey analysis and semi-structured interviews, produce replicable and contextualized knowledge.
The shift from the “advocacy era” to the “expert era” was fostered by introducing new mechanisms and changing the practices in already existing mechanisms. Local governments only allow deliberation in public and town hall meetings when the issue at stake is of low priority for them but has the potential to cause controversy among the public. Besides, there are now more expert meetings, and in many public hearings, the seats for ordinary citizens are filled by experts. There has also been a shift from collective interest representation to individual legal representation in China, and the hierarchies among the producers of expert knowledge follow the same trend. Therefore, this research argues that the shift from representation to expertise in the practices and discourses of participatory governance negatively affects the political efficacy of participants, experts, and stakeholders alike.
Shifting Geographies of Statehood in Telangana: Policymaking for Urban Development and Social Dignity in Hyderabad
Loraine Kennedy
CNRS Research Director | Member of the Center for South Asian Studies (CEIAS) | École des Hautes | Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS)
The starting point for this research is the creation of India’s newest state, Telangana, formed in 2014 from the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh. This extraordinary event has led to the re-scaling of state space and, it is assumed, to the disruption of previously existing infrastructures underpinning knowledge production within the state apparatus.
The accession to statehood came after decades of struggle built on a perceived sense of discrimination against Telangana natives on the part of dominant social groups from coastal Andhra. The proposed research will center on the “Dignity Housing” scheme, projected to provide 100,000 new housing units for the urban poor in Hyderabad. Approximately one-third of the capital city’s population lives in slums, a proportion that has increased sharply in the last 20 years. This flagship policy is a compelling prism through which to examine the shifting geographies of expertise and policymaking as it articulates the key components of urban development politics, i.e., urban land, a valuable commodity, much of which is effectively owned by the state, and the “management” of the urban poor, the most vulnerable of whom reside in illegal settlements and who are essential for the electoral survival of the ruling party. While the housing scheme provides an empirical anchor for exploring the epistemic communities that inform policy, the broader political economic analysis will question the government’s ability to maintain a growth coalition with economic elites.
The Belts, Roads, and Initiatives of the Belt and Road Initiative: Global China’s Pluralist Authoritarian Production of Expertise
Yifei LI
Assistant Professor | Environmental Studies | NYU Shanghai | Assistant Professor | Global Network | New York University
The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) boasts a multitude of belts, roads, and initiatives. On the face of it, the BRI seems to have instituted every imaginable form of pluralism and accountability throughout its architecture. Projects receive financial support from an assortment of private sources, government subsidies, bilateral funding mechanisms, and multilateral policy banks. They further involve a constellation of actors, including government ministries, state-owned enterprises, insurance companies, private business conglomerates and consortiums, research networks, and civic organizations. Implementation is even conditioned upon an array of externally administered environmental, labor, and financial assessments.
Do the belts, roads, and initiatives signal global China’s pivot toward pluralism overseas despite deepening authoritarianism at home? While there are many different angles to address this overarching question, I focus on the production of developmental expertise in the BRI. This way, I am able to investigate the implications of China’s increasing presence globally from the vantage point of knowledge and expertise, which are central to the enterprise of international development. Specifically, I ask the following two interrelated research questions: How does the BRI’s apparent pluralism handle conflicting developmental interests, as well as contrasting developmental values and norms, in the production of expertise? To what extent does the BRI unsettle or reproduce the existing transnational geographies of knowledge and expertise?
Coping with COVID-19: Political Processes and Action: A Case Study of M East Ward of Mumbai
Avinash Madhale
Program Coordinator | Tata Institute of Social Sciences
Mumbai emerged as the epicenter of the pandemic in India. The relationship between informal settlements, which form nearly half the population of Mumbai, and the city is a critical question. Declaration of countrywide lockdown had left everyone clueless for a period of time. The role of elected representatives (at all levels) remained unclear, with very limited scope for political action. In the initial phase, elected representatives reached out to civil society groups to get dry ration kits and other essential items. They faced a unique challenge of addressing out-of-scope expectations of residents in their wards with limited cooperation from the municipal administration.
The objectives of this study are to understand the trajectory of changing political action to cope with COVID-19 in the M East ward of Mumbai. This action research will employ mixed methods of Interviews with all fifteen elected representatives in M East ward and key municipal officials, community leaders, and civil society groups.
As COVID-19 pushed political representatives beyond municipal functions, it might have forced politicians to deal with this unique situation. The study attempts to deep dive into understanding the experience and perspective of elected representatives through semi-structured interviews, followed by sharing learning from a survey of 26,000 households as part of a field action project of TISS. The response of elected representatives to evidence generated through action research intervention, and vulnerability index would be documented, along with developing innovative models of coping with COVID-19 in Mumbai slums.
Dr. Fauci in China: Medical Authority, Policymaking, and China’s Responses to Covid-19
Xuefei Ren
Professor | Sociology and Global Urban Studies | Michigan State University
This project examines the relationship between Chinese scientists and government authorities over policymaking during the COVID-19 pandemic. It will focus on three scientists: Dr. Zhong Nanshan in Guangzhou, the late Dr. Li Wenliang in Wuhan, and Dr. Zhang Wenhong in Shanghai.
These three experts intervened at different junctures during the pandemic and met different fates. By examining the trajectories of the three doctors, this project will address the following questions: Why are the opinions of some experts privileged and others sidelined? How do seniority, location (such as home cities and institutions), and the timing of intervention influence public discourse and policymaking? Through what media technologies do medical experts try to reach the public and influence policies, and to what effect? Drawing upon media analysis, policy analysis, and interviews with a larger pool of Chinese doctors, the project will shed light on how medical experts have influenced China’s “zero-tolerance” strategies such as lockdowns, “grid governance,” digital surveillance, mass testing, and border control. A comparative analysis with India’s Covid-19 policies will be explored as well.
Challenging the Hierarchy of Civil Nuclear Policymaking and Expertise in India: Social Opposition to Nuclear Power Plants
Kesava Chandra Varigonda
Postdoctoral Research Fellow | Asia Research Institute (ARI) | National University of Singapore
The Indian state pursues a top-down, hierarchicalised approach to formulating and implementing civil nuclear energy policy. This approach has given rise to a bottom-up social opposition, particularly from the economically marginalized populace living near proposed nuclear projects, and civil society-based anti-nuclear activists. This project studies how social opposition to nuclear power plants has challenged the state-centric hierarchy of policymaking, and notions of ‘expertise’ in the formulation and implementation of civil nuclear policy in India.
Through empirical research of three intra-national cases of social movements that have emerged in opposition to nuclear power plants, in Kovvada in Andhra Pradesh, Kudankulam in Tamil Nadu, and Haripur in West Bengal, this study demonstrates how opposition movements have utilized similar repertoires to challenge the state’s hierarchical policymaking. These repertoires primarily include mass mobilizations, petitioning key facets of the state, forming allegiances, and approaching the judiciary. The study also demonstrates how opposition movements have put forth similar arguments to claim “expertise” on civil nuclear power. By questioning the inherent safety of a nuclear power plant, its efficacy as an energy provider, and its necessity to the lives and livelihoods of the marginalized sections of society, social opposition has sought to redefine the contours of “expertise” on civil nuclear power.
En/gendering Chinese Rural Reconstruction: Scholar Activism, Policy Making, and Women Unheard
Yang ZHAN
Assistant Professor | Department of Applied Social Sciences | The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Rural development was central to nation-building and state formation for many global South countries since the first half of the twentieth century. In China, the rural reconstruction movement appeared in the 1930s, featuring practical projects as well as theoretical debates led by Chinese intellectuals, scholars, and students. In the late 1990s, a new wave of Chinese rural reconstruction movement emerged, which again intertwined with scholar activism.
As a knowledge production process, Chinese rural reconstruction has been nationalistic. Nationalism is gendered first because rural women are framed as passive and marginal subjects who have little capacity to act on their own will. More importantly, in the shadow of nationalistic rural reconstruction frameworks, core issues concerning feminist scholars were often framed secondary, subjected to the national agenda of development. This does not mean that women scholars have no contribution to rural development practices. On the contrary, since the late 1980s, women intellectuals and activists have been leaders in designing and implementing rural projects all over China. However, what has been said and done by women scholars were often treated as “cases” rather than “theories.” This proposed research focuses on the largely ignored knowledge production by women scholars and activists and traces the discursive formations of feminism in Chinese rural development since the 1990s. The major goal is to explain why knowledge produced by women is subjected to a patriarchal discourse of “national development.”
Identifying Factors for the Divergence of Policy Priority in Universalizing Elementary Education in India and China
Wenjuan Zhang
Associate Professor | Jindal Global Law School | Executive Director | Center for India-China Studies
As the two most populous and largest developing countries globally and as the state parties of the CRC, India and China have made a substantial commitment to promoting free and universal elementary education (UEE) in each context. Regarding reducing illiteracy and gender disparity of UEE, it is believed that China has outperformed India. Some scholars have tried to explain it from policy approaches or social and cultural factors.
However, from the literacy trend of the two countries shown in the UNESCO data, we could find that India and China could take almost the same number of years to reach almost 100 percent of literacy and to reduce the gender gap to almost 0 for the youth aged 15-24 as per the UEE. This is strong evidence for the paper to assume that the divergence of UEE performance mainly rests on the policy agenda-setting. This research applies the comparative method to advance our knowledge of the policymaking process in the UEE sector to explain and predict what influences the policy agenda-setting of UEE in both countries. Through the initial research, I argue that ideology and power structure matter for placing UEE as a policy priority and for translating it into policy agenda in the two countries.
Expertise in the Biomedical Industry: Rethinking the Relationships between Knowledge, State, and Globalization in China
Yu ZHOU
Professor | Department of Geography | Vassar College
Global biocapitalism has been based on assetization and financialization of bioscience knowledge and is facilitated by the globalization of the Intellectual Property Right (IPR) regime and the venture capital industry. Biocapitalism shifts the grounds of innovation from competitive commodity production and exchanges to generating, managing, and commercializing bioscientific patents; thus, it raises new questions in theorizing innovation processes in developing countries.
A growing literature on the biomedical industry from developing Asia underscores the multitudinous challenges of these countries to respond to domestic medical needs, build credible science capacities and translate scientific research into a thriving biomedical industry. Chinese biomedical companies had long contended to produce off-patent generic drugs or traditional Chinese medicine exclusively for the domestic market. Despite the favorable state policies since the 1980s, the innovation in this sector has been underperforming. Yet, without integration with the leading multinational companies, China’s biomedical sector is experiencing a stunning turnaround in the 2010s. Not only have public and private investments surged in the field, but Chinese companies are filing a growing number of new drug applications to Chinese and foreign drug authorities in recent years. The dramatic differences have been catalyzed by an overhaul of the Chinese drug regulatory regime since 2015 to be more in line with the US and EU regime, while strengthened state control of the medical market through a national insurance program. This research examines China’s potential model of innovation in the biomedical field as a new articulation between state regulation, domestic industry, and international hegemony.
