The forthcoming article “Getting on the grid: A field experiment on bottom-up political pressure and access to essential public services” by Nikhar Gaikwad and Anjali Thomas is summarized by the author(s) below.
In developing nations, basic human rights such as access to clean drinking water are often inaccessible to millions of marginalized citizens. Such failures in public service delivery are frequently the result of politicians and bureaucrats entrenched in vested interests and competing priorities. Consequently, socio-economically disadvantaged citizens are forced to rely on informal channels to access essential services, which renders them illegible to the state and disincentivizes political responsiveness to their condition. Resource insecurity thereby becomes the equilibrium, making increased access to public services one of human development’s most vexing problems.
“Getting on the Grid” examines how marginalized communities can escape informality and incentivize governments to provide essential public services. We develop a theoretical framework to illustrate how public service provision occurs through a multi-stage process, wherein each stage entails distinct degrees of bureaucratic discretion and political influence. We argue that formalized public services have two different stages: a petitioning stage and an infrastructural stage. In the petitioning stage, it is relatively simple for bureaucrats to adjudicate the validity of petitions filed by citizens to claim services to which they are entitled. However, in the infrastructural stage, extensive bureaucratic coordination is required to establish the physical infrastructure for service delivery. Politicians play a key role at the infrastructural stage to facilitate coordination between agencies, but only when they have the electoral incentives to do so. Therefore, citizens encounter distinct hurdles at each stage of the service delivery process. In the petitioning stage, they face significant “hassle costs” in interfacing with the bureaucracy; in the infrastructure stage, they must overcome coordination problems to collectively make claims on politicians who can in turn pressure bureaucrats to deliver services. Barriers endemic to each of the stages need to be overcome jointly for societies to shift out of the status quo of informality.
We used our theoretical framework to design a cluster randomized control trial run in partnership with two local NGOs between 2018 and 2023 across almost 7,000 households in informal settlements in Mumbai, one of the world’s largest cities. Our focus was on access to municipal water; large swaths of Mumbai’s settlement dwellers have historically been unable to link up to the city’s water supply system. We implemented two different large-scale interventions targeting the two stages in which citizens face hurdles to claim-making: a bureaucratic assistance treatment arm, where NGO partners helped citizens navigate the process required to establish eligibility for formal services; and a political coordination treatment arm, where NGO workers convened public events, mobilized group visits to politician and bureaucrat offices, and organized collective petitions to demand access.
Our findings reveal that citizen empowerment interventions led by civil society organizations that provide bureaucratic assistance and political coordination to marginalized communities can have powerful effects when delivered in tandem. In settlements that were legally eligible for formalized water, bureaucratic assistance in the presence of political coordination increased the likelihood of citizens receiving municipal water connection by about 19 percentage points, or about 45% of the control mean. We show that while the bureaucratic assistance intervention helped citizens navigate the petitioning stage, political coordination played an important role in boosting the effect of this intervention in the infrastructural stage. Moreover, these effects emerged not in the immediate aftermath of the interventions but in the run-up to subsequent municipal elections, thus highlighting the importance of political incentives in shaping service delivery. The combined interventions also had positive results in migrant dominant settlements represented by nativist politicians, showing that politicians respond to coordinated citizen pressure even outside their traditional constituencies.
With the first study to experimentally examine the joint effect of bureaucratic assistance and political coordination interventions, we illuminate a potential pathway through which citizens can overcome the vicious cycle of informality. Specifically, our findings show how scalable interventions that both reduce citizens’ inconvenience costs as well as give them political voice can succeed in securing them access to municipal services. At the same time, our research clarifies the limits of such interventions, suggesting that they do not work in situations where the legal framework precludes informal settlements from receiving formalized public services or where politicians do not face electoral incentives to respond to bottom-up pressure. Nevertheless, our results highlight that civil society organizations in the Global South can successfully expand marginalized citizens’ access formal public services by pursuing bureaucratic and political pathways simultaneously.
About the Author(s): Nikhar Gaikwad is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and a Member of the Committee on Global Thought, Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, and the South Asia Institute at Columbia University and Anjali Thomas is an Associate Professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, Director of the Nunn School Program in Global Development, and a 2024 (Non-Resident) Fellow at the Gothenburg Governance and Local Development Institute. Their research “Getting on the grid: A field experiment on bottom-up political pressure and access to essential public services” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.
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