India: Conditions for women's inclusive and effective political participation in South Asia

We wanted to identify drivers and barriers to women participation in local politics in three South Asian countries: India, Nepal and Bhutan, where patriarchical attitudes and traditions historically have limited women?s participation to the private space. We carried out a survey of 6600 political and civil society leaders and ordinary people and held focus groups discussions and interviews with around 100 individuals. Surveys were carried out in the state of Karnataka in India, the Eastern district of Nawalparasi in Nepal and in Western Bhutan. Survey results showed overwhelmingly positive attitudes towards women?s participation in local politics and women and men were equally supportive. Respondents had confidence in women?s abilities, and they were less worried that her political participation would affect her family?s reputation negatively or disturb her domestic responsibilities. These findings indicate a shift from traditional patriarchical social norms in India and Nepal and the deeply embedded practice in all three countries that politics is men?s domain, towards greater acceptance of gender equality in politics. There is a lot of evidence from earlier research that individual characteristics constitute barriers to women?s participation. Our survey confirmed that such differences remain. Women scored lower than men on socio-economic variables of importance to political participation, such as education, literacy and economic resources. However, the real gap was found in women?s and men?s assessment of their self-confidence and knowledge. On these indicators, women had a much more negative assessment of themselves. This translates into less assertiveness in politics. To some extent, differences in educational levels between women and men explains this gap. Rather than seeing the family as an inhibitor or supporter, we have argued that politics is a collaborative effort among family members and it is through family support that leaders become effective, irrespective of gender. Our findings suggest that connectedness in the form of family-, community-, civil society- and political support is critical to political leadership. This is not surprising as having a political constituency is crucial to being an effective politician. In this perspective, the family forms part of a social network that is required to support women to become effective leaders. Women and men have almost equally strong social networks, indicating that women have the required networks to become political leaders. Women as well as men consult with their families before making decisions, and we argue that such consultations reflect the notion that politics is a family affair, and that family support is required in the same way that social networks are required. The three countries have introduced a number of measures to increase women's representation at the local level, such as reservation, training, and women?s representation in planning processes. However, the only measure that has effectively addressed the gender imbalance in politics is reservation. Karnataka has implemented reservation rigorously and as a result the number of women representatives in elected bodies has increased to over 50%. These women also reflect the ethnic and caste composition of the population because reservation for women takes place in combination with reservation for caste and ethnic groups. In comparison, the fragmented institutions for participatory planning in Nepal have not secured representation of women and ethnic groups and the matriarchical nature of society in Bhutan has not translated into women?s participation in local level politics. More than anything else, the political parties remain bastions of male, high caste dominance and efforts to introduce modest quotas for women have not made any significant difference. Not only has reservation led to an increase in the number of women representatives, women leaders in Karnataka scored much higher on capacity indicators than did women in Nepal and Bhutan. Thus, women leaders in Karnataka viewed themselves as more effective. This is because reservation has created a relatively even playing field where women and men representatives have equal access to government funding for their constituencies, giving women confidence in their capacities to serve their communities. The study has been carried out with Myrada (Bangalore), SAIPL and Tribhuvan University (Kathmandu) and the Royal University of Bhutan.

This study seeks to understand the conditions for women's political participation in India, Bhutan and Nepal. These countries have recently introduced measures to strengthen local governance structures and more specifically women's political participation at the local level. Simultaneously, more resources are flowing from the central to local governments to strengthen the development role of local bodies, and in particularly in India there has been a significant increase in allocations. This means that an institutional and policy framework for women's political participation has been put in place over the last few years. The debate in India and Nepal has hence shifted to a concern with the conditions for inclusive participation and access to power. Inclus ivity is a critical challenge in South Asia where discrimination based on caste, ethnicity and religion is pervasive. In the debate gender is typically listed as a dimension of exclusion, while in this study, we propose to analyze caste, ethnic and religi ous differences among women to understand how these dimensions intersect with gender. Finally, women's effective participation will be measured along four dimensions; their ability to contribute to more and better services, their capacity to strengthen do wnward accountability, their up-stream policy influence; and their ability to place gender issues on the agenda. Data will mainly be collected from randomly selected Local Government Authorities in the three countries through a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, including representative surveys, in-depth personal and focus group interviews, and document analysis. Our interest lies in assessing common conditions for participation across the cases, but also in explaining variations.