Elected local bodies, space, and the governance of market expansion in rural India

Departing from scholarship related to democratic decentralization which has largely treated the phenomenon through the lenses of comparative politics, public choice and participatory governance; I identify democratic decentralization as a form of state restructuring of rural spaces during an era of market expansion. Drawing upon political geography and critical governance studies and based on multi-site ethnographic fieldwork in India, elected local bodies are identified as mediators of market-society conflicts, builders of infrastructure to overcome spatio-temporal barriers to the movement of capital, and legitimators of new property regimes at the geopolitical margins. Market expansion by means of democratic decentralization is a window onto the transformation of statehood during second wave economic reforms in India, and unsettles the premise of grassroots democratization advancing distributional justice in the locality.