Overview

Examining anticorruption battles and transparency laws to ask: what makes for good governance, and can it limit liberal democratic politics as much as encourage it? Good governance is meant to empower citizens, increase democratic participation, and make states transparent and accountable, yet this liberal democratic imperative can also promote populist authoritarian rule. Bringing together discourses on ethical goodness with the technicalities of governance as expressed in laws and policies, Aradhana Sharma develops the concept of ""technomoral politics"" to navigate this fraught topic. With a focus on the work of activists, citizens, and state officials, she offers an ethnographic account of the contradictions and dangers of good-governance politics in twenty-first-century India. A Technomoral Politics follows the evolution of a group of activists in New Delhi led by Arvind Kejriwal from 2008 to 2014 as they morphed from a protransparency NGO to a mass movement against state corruption to a populist party that promised to change the political system through laws and policies. Sharma explores the technomoral framing of state opacity and corruption as well as the limits of the law in resolving these issues, probing such themes as the contradictory relationship between transparency and bureaucracy and the classed and gendered nature of democratic state institutions. By examining scalar dimensions of good-governance politics, from the hyperlocal work of activists to global trends, A Technomoral Politics illuminates the paradoxes, limits, and risks of a system that is meant to spread liberal democratic principles but that also ends up promoting antidemocratic, populist-authoritarian forms of rule. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

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9781517918088

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Reviews

"""An absolutely brilliant and essential account of how social movements demanding transparency and opposing corruption have irrevocably changed the terrain of governance and democratic politics in India. This book holds major implications for how we come to understand good governance agendas as well as seemingly technical reforms the world over. Carefully researched and lucidly written, this is a must-read for anyone interested in the state, citizenship, social movements, democracy, and populist authoritarianism."" —Nayanika Mathur, University of Oxford   ""Aradhana Sharma’s lyrical storytelling brings to life a diverse collection of anticorruption activists who struggled to change law and politics in India. A Technomoral Politics is an astute analysis of Indian politics, a cautionary tale of populism’s danger, and an essential read for understanding the electoral politics of good governance."" —Erica Bornstein, University of Oregon  "

Author Information

Aradhana Sharma is associate professor of anthropology at Wesleyan University. She is author of Logics of Empowerment: Development, Gender, and Governance in Neoliberal India (Minnesota, 2008).

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