Demanding Development: The Politics of Public Goods Provision in India's Urban Slums

CASI Seminar

A Book Talk with the Author

Co-sponsored with the Comparative Politics Workshop

Adam Auerbach
Assistant Professor, School of International Service, American University
Center for the Advanced Study of India
Ronald O. Perelman Center for Political Science & Economics
133 South 36th Street, Suite 230
Philadelphia PA 19104-6215

About the Author:
Adam Auerbach is an Assistant Professor in the School of International Service at American University. His research focuses on local governance, urban politics, and the political economy of development, with a regional focus on South Asia and India, in particular. His research has appeared or is forthcoming in the American Journal of Political ScienceAmerican Political Science ReviewJournal of PoliticsStudies in Comparative International DevelopmentWorld Development, and World Politics.

About the Book:
Demanding Development: The Politics of Public Goods Provision in India’s Urban Slums (Cambridge University Press, 2019)
India’s urban slums exhibit dramatic variation in their access to local public goods and services—paved roads, piped water, trash removal, sewers, and streetlights. Why are some vulnerable communities able to demand and secure development from the state while others fail? Drawing on more than two years of fieldwork in the north Indian cities of Bhopal and Jaipur, Demanding Development accounts for the uneven success of India’s slum residents in securing local public goods and services from the state. Auerbach’s theory centers on the political organization of slum settlements and the informal slum leaders who spearhead resident efforts to make claims on the state—in particular, those slum leaders who are party workers. He finds striking variation in the extent to which networks of party workers have spread across slum settlements. Demanding Development shows how this variation in the density and partisan distribution of party workers across settlements has powerful consequences for the ability of residents to politically mobilize to improve local conditions.

[Event Flyer]

The Nand & Jeet Khemka Distinguished Lecture Series is an endowed public program of the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI). Launched in the 2007-08 academic year, and made possible through the generous support of the Nand & Jeet Khemka Foundation, the series brings renowned India specialists to the Penn community and serves as a critical forum for analyzing and understanding the complex economic, political, social, and cultural changes that the world’s largest democracy is experiencing, as well as the challenges that lie ahead.
The Saluja Global Fellows Program has been made possible by the generous gift from Vishal Saluja ENG’89 W’89. CASI was excited to launch the program during the 2022–23 academic year, coinciding with the Center’s 30th Anniversary. This new program enables CASI to invite eminent leaders and rising experts on contemporary India preferably from the fields of media, culture, law, and contemporary history to be in residence for one to two weeks at CASI.