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Since the onset of the twenty-first century, India has initiated various social welfare programs to provide social protection for the people who have been marginalized from the formal social safety net. Since 2005, legislation has granted a series of social rights to marginalized rural households. Among these rights-based welfare programs, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) stands out as the flagship initiative of India’s new welfare system. It has targeted marginalized informal rural households, who have not enjoyed the fruits of the social safety net, by formally granting them the right to employment. It has also incorporated new governance ideas such as a demand-driven approach, decentralized implementation, and social audit to increase accountability and transparency. The MGNREGA has emerged as the largest social welfare scheme in terms of budget allocation and coverage, yielding positive outcomes such as increased beneficiary incomes, advancement of gender equality, and creation of assets in rural areas. Nonetheless, despite the expansion of the MGNREGA all over India, policy outcomes have been uneven between the states in terms of participation rates, the relationship between poverty level and participation, and cumulative average person-days per household. This prompts the question: why does the MGNREGA produce superior policy outcomes in certain states but not in others? By delving into the politics surrounding policy implementation at the local level, this paper argues that the degree of goal congruence between policy implementers shapes divergent policy outcomes.

Is the much discussed ‘rise of China’ a threat or an opportunity for the rest of the region of which it has historically been such a dominant part? This question is an especially pressing concern for the countries of Southeast Asia as they try to come to terms with a neighbour which dwarfs them economically, strategically and even demographically. Indeed, the impact of China’s demographic expansion has been felt throughout the region for several hundred years, as the Chinese diaspora has come to assume an economic and political importance in Southeast Asia that is out of proportion with its actual size (Cheung 2004). Now, with the re-emergence of mainland China as the region’s dominant economy and its most important strategic actor, new challenges confront Southeast Asia’s political elites as they try to come to terms with a rapidly evolving regional order. Complicating this political calculus is the fact that China is becoming stronger while the US — the traditional mainstay of regional security — appears to be going into decline (Beeson 2008). The key question for Southeast Asia’s smaller economies and less powerful polities is can they manage — or at least successfully come to terms with — a re-ascendant giant neighbour to their north?…

The economic and political crises that have recently engulfed the countries of Southeast Asia provide a stark reminder of just how difficult the challenge of sustained regional development remains. In retrospect, the hyperbole that surrounded the ‘East Asian miracle’ looks overblown, and testimony to the manner in which rhetoric can outstrip reality, especially in the minds of international investors. Certainly, some observers had questioned the depth and resilience of capitalist development in Southeast Asia (Kunio 1988), but in the years immediately prior to 1997 such analyses tended to be in the minority. Now, of course, it is painfully obvious that much of Southeast Asia’s economic and political development was extremely fragile. And yet, when seen in historical context, this outcome should not have been so surprising. For the fact remains that the countries of modern Southeast Asia, both as independent nations and as colonies of various imperial powers, have been highly vulnerable to the actions of powerful external political and economic forces. This chapter will examine the economic bases and the political consequences of this vulnerability, both domestically and at a regional level. I argue that the recent crisis has served as an unwelcome reminder of just how constrained, dependent and vulnerable the Southeast Asia region’s development prospects remain, a situation that is exacerbated by, and which contributes to, domestic political crises…