This research focuses on how water sector reforms are unfolding in the state of Maharashtra, India. In 2005, Maharashtra launched an ambitious reform programme with support from the World Bank to establish an independent water regulator and make water user associations mandatory for water delivery in the state. The establishment of the regulator, the first of its kind in the Indian water sector, invited much attention from policy makers and civil society organisations after which several Indian states followed Maharashtra's footsteps. Celebrated for its ‘independent' and ‘apolitical' virtues, this model of regulation was designed to provide answers to inefficiency and political opportunism in the water sector. What gained immense traction in the regulatory discourse was the concept of entitlements and the possibility of introducing water markets for ‘efficient' pricing and distribution of water. To date, however, this reform project has faced reversals, limitations and subversions which have been described as ‘evolution' by pro-reformers and ‘failures' by the resisting groups. This thesis shows how a seemingly ‘apolitical' initiative aimed to dilute the authority of the State in the water sector is subverted to shape and reinforce its control. Though the idea of independent water regulator is increasingly getting mainstreamed into water policy discourses in India, divergent framings and rationales have made regulation a deeply contested political process. In Maharashtra, the turf war between politicians, the water resources department and the water regulator coupled with cases of corporate water grab lie at the heart of rule-making for regulation. This has made the authority of the water regulator and the meaning of regulation ambiguous and blurred. This ambiguity in turn shapes the distribution of water entitlements. In the sugarcane belt of Western Maharashtra where farmers access water from different sources, entitlements are shaped by persistent inequities in water distribution. They take on different meanings as they are subsumed into struggles over water control between the irrigation officials and the farmers on one hand, and amongst different groups of the farmers on the other. This struggle over meanings and practices across the reform process constitutes what I call “regulatory cultures” in this thesis. Using anthropological methods to study policy processes, this work shows how water regulation is discursively shaped and becomes a deeply political practice embedded in networks of power. These networks are formed at the intersection of donors, different layers of irrigation bureaucracy, water user associations and prosperous sugarcane farmers. I argue that the architecture of the Indian State, embedded in these very networks, is central to understanding the politics and practice of water regulation in Maharashtra.

At the core of any effort by a nation state to regulate new technologies for public release is an implicit navigation of uncertainty. The case of Bt cotton in India presents a very timely and pragmatic example of how nation states grapple with uncertainty in a regulatory context. While much attention has been given to how government actors form regulation, far less is given to how actors outside of the government spheres act as catalysts for regulatory reform. In practice, it is often these parties that drive regulation as a process. The question is how. This paper outlines the findings of fieldwork conducted in India between March 2007 and July 2009 in addressing this central question: what does regulation really mean in a context where new technologies burdened with uncertain consequences are introduced? How do preferences, decisions, and regulatory norms adapt to this introduction based on the interactions of a multitude of parties acting on multiple framings of understanding what risk means? The conclusion is that regulation – in the context of Bt cotton in India - is far from a set of government policies derived from scientific measures of risk assessment. Civil society, firms, and farmers themselves all have tremendous influence on how a nation state navigates uncertainty in a regulatory context. It is a process forged on risk interfaces, where constructions of risk both complement and oppose one another. The actors involved enter these spaces, invited or otherwise. What the government may have initially imagined as ‘regulation' is subject to multiple technical, economic, and political framings of risk from each actor. As a result, regulation is a coevolutionary, co-constructed process. This process of negotiating these spaces is what regulation really means.

This thesis presents an analysis of the demand and impact of crop microinsurance in India. The study is based on extensive fieldwork and primary data collection from two field sites in India. The first empirical chapter examines the impact of crop microinsurance on output. Accounting for the endogeneity of insurance investment, this chapter uses a two-step instrumental variables approach to assess the impact of insurance on yield for two varieties of paddy. The assessment is based on secondary district level data and primary household survey data. The findings indicate that impact of insurance on yield is not homogeneous across crops. It is based on the flexibility of the crop's input requirement structure. The second chapter explores the impact of crop insurance on the use of inputs such as seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation and labour for paddy varieties. This chapter is a significant addition to the existing small pool of literature on the impacts of crop insurance on a range of inputs. Since both insurance and input decisions are ex-ante, a simultaneous equations model is employed to assess impacts. Results show that the impact of crop microinsurance varies based on the type of input, crop under consideration and its significance in the income portfolio of a farmer. The final chapter assesses the demand for crop microinsurance using a contingent valuation experiment on turmeric farmers. This is a first of its kind attempt to delineate the willingness to join (WTJ) from the amount of willingness to pay (WTP) for crop insurance policies. Results based on a Heckman selection model, indicate that while the WTJ is influenced by risk attitudes and product literacy, the amount of WTP is driven by a careful assessment of the other risk coping avenues available to a household. Only the ‘residual' risk is passed on to insurance.

Microfinance has attracted, since its inception at the end of the seventies, the attention of many people and institutions, both at academic and donor levels. However, evidence is mixed so far and no definitive conclusion has yet emerged with respect to the positive effects of microfinance, in part because of the great differences among the different microfinance schemes but also because of methodological issues. This work aims to add some further evidence to the impact debate, with three studies in two different rural areas from Bangladesh and India. The first study is based on the second round of a survey in Bangladesh undertaken by the World Bank. A Propensity Score Matching approach was chosen to study the impact of borrowing on household income and expenditures per capita. In this case positive impact can only be seen in extraordinary expenditures, in particular in house extensions and investments in houses and land, but not in current expenditures or food expenditures. The second and third studies analyse a dataset collected in five districts of Andhra Pradesh, India. The former tries to answer the question of whether borrowing from Self- Help groups (SHGs) has any effect on income and income per capita at household level. Pooled ordinary least squares and difference in differences approaches are used to that end. A significant impact is found in this study on income and income per capita. In the last empirical work the main interest is focused on the distributional impact, on the understanding that anti-poverty measures should be focused on households at the bottom tail of income and income per capita distributions. Its analysis is based on quantile regression, with cross sectional and panel data approaches. Distributional impact shows, however, that the poorest might not be benefitting from these interventions as much as better-off or not-so-poor households.

This thesis considers Participatory Crop Improvement (PCI) methodologies and examines the reasons behind their continued contestation and limited mainstreaming in conventional modes of crop improvement research within National Agricultural Research Systems (NARS). In particular, it traces the experiences of a long-established research network with over 20 years of experience in developing and implementing PCI methods across South Asia, and specifically considers its engagement with the Indian NARS and associated state-level agricultural research systems. In order to address the issues surrounding PCI institutionalisation processes, a novel conceptual framework was derived from a synthesis of the literatures on Strategic Niche Management (SNM) and Learning-based Development Approaches (LBDA) to analyse the socio-technical processes and structures which constitute the PCI ‘niche' and NARS ‘regime'. In examining the niche and regime according to their socio-technical characteristics, the framework provides explanatory power for understanding the nature of their interactions and the opportunities and barriers that exist with respect to the translation of lessons and ideas between niche and regime organisations. The research shows that in trying to institutionalise PCI methods and principles within NARS in the Indian context, PCI proponents have encountered a number of constraints related to the rigid and hierarchical structure of the regime organisations; the contractual mode of most conventional research, which inhibits collaboration with a wider group of stakeholders; and the time-limited nature of PCI projects themselves, which limits investment and hinders scaling up of the innovations. It also reveals that while the niche projects may be able to induce a ‘weak' form of PCI institutionalisation within the Indian NARS by helping to alter their institutional culture to be more supportive of participatory plant breeding approaches and future collaboration with PCI researchers, a ‘strong' form of PCI institutionalisation, in which NARS organisations adopt participatory methodologies to address all their crop improvement agenda, is likely to remain outside of the capacity of PCI development projects to deliver.

This thesis explores the tensions that arise when business enterprises respond to situations that have both commercial aspects and implications for workers. Using Grounded Theory methodology it examines data from 56 case profiles, extensive interviews and secondary sources in order to understand the nature and variety of the social and commercial commitments that enterprises in the Indian textile and garment industries make and how these are influenced by the rules and conventions inherent in global value chains and in the local culture. It uses concepts drawn from Convention Theory, from social realism and from the social justice literature to develop an analytical framework that explains how priorities are coordinated in three arenas – within enterprises, in interactions connected with the workplace and in society as a whole. The findings show that, in the mainstream, social commitments are generally weak and behaviour towards workers is inconsistent, reflecting a reactive stance that ethical trading has done little to change. Most social enterprises have similarly weak commercial commitments and efforts by Fair Trade organisations to reach mainstream markets have proved problematic. Few examples have been found of commercial success achieved in a way that also meets the criteria of social justice. Those cases that have come closest have created new business models that integrate social and commercial values, forged by means of long-term business relationships or partnerships. A variety of mutually-reinforcing factors combine to determine the balance of priorities – public discourse, engagement by stakeholders, including workers, and internal processes for resolving differences – and these are affected by the level of scrutiny and openness to organisational learning. Interventions aimed at greater social justice in the industry or at scaling up social enterprise need to recognise the complexity of these interrelationships and the ways in which rules, conventions and commitments blend to determine behaviour.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2004. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 443-467). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2004. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 443-467). Also available on the Internet.

Sanitation continues to represent one of the most significant problems threatening the world population. In this scenario, India still encounters several difficulties in guaranteeing generalized access to adequate sanitation and, for this reason, in 2014, Clean India Mission was launched. In order to provide an assessment of the campaign, semi-qualitative interviews were carried out with two different target groups – Gram Panchayat representatives and household heads – in the rural area surrounding the Gram Panchayat of Badkulla I and II. The analysis of the data collected reported that the Gram Panchayat representatives had a central and active role in the promotion, realization and monitoring of the guidelines of Swachh Bharat Abhiyan program. However, the SBA implementation did not wholly follow the campaign guidelines, and it did not appear totally in line with what suggested by the community-led approach. Moreover, the different initiatives included in the campaign presented some problematics, such as difficulties in accessing the campaign incentives, low-quality construction of the latrines, uneven spread of the communication activities and low sustainability of the campaign results. At the same time, the community members seemed more aware of the importance of better sanitation standards but generally unsatisfied with the campaign performance. The assessment of the campaign highlighted the significant influence that context and actors involved played in the campaign realization and how the missing focus on critical aspects, such as prioritizing the numbers of toilets over their quality, profoundly affected the campaign results and sustainability over time. A future sanitation campaign should be focusing on addressing the shortcomings of Swachh Bharat Abhiyan by also taking into consideration the potential challenges represented by financial constraints, continuous change in households’ structure, local social norms and climatic conditions.

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