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“Who Participates? Rethinking Civil Society in the Context of Competing Definitions of

Urban Sustainability”

Author: Rowan Ellis

Affiliation: University of Aberdeen, Department of Geography and the Environment

Abstract: This paper evaluates the impact of civil society organizations on more qualitative

measures of citizen participation in urban development. The study is based on eleven months of

ethnographic and policy-analysis field research into the restoration and redevelopment of the

Adyar River in Chennai, India. The paper makes three key contributions to the study of urban

governance. The first is to emphasize the contradictions and tensions between urban livelihood

issues and environmental restoration. The second contribution is to highlight the strengths and

limitations of civil society-centered definitions of citizen participation. Finally, the paper

concludes by suggesting that participation could be enhanced through collaboration with a

greater diversity of citizen organizations.

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Introduction

In this paper, I evaluate the impact of civil society organizations on more qualitative measures of

citizen participation in urban development. The assumption contained within this evaluation is

that citizen participation is realized when people are able to bring their livelihood concerns and

quality of life issues to bear on decisions about how to (re)develop urban areas. The conflicts

surrounding environmental sustainability and urban poverty in cities of the global South shed

new light on how citizen participation gets differently enacted in these contexts. Furthermore,

these conflicts highlight the ambiguity that remains around urban development outcomes, even

in the context of expanded civil society involvement. Thus the paper concludes by suggesting

that definitions of citizen participation should be broadened to include a greater diversity of

organizational forms.

Context

Over the course of two days in June of 2007 between 300 and 500 homes were demolished along

a backwater of the Adyar River in the neighborhood of Raja Gramani, Chennai, India (see

Figures 1 & 2)1. On the day of the demolitions, residents protested and refused to leave their

homes, but they were quickly disbanded when the police were called in. Within hours of the

demolitions, a fence was put up around the rubble preventing anyone from returning to the site.

A neighborhood association was formed to represent the plight of the residents of Raja Gramani

yet despite appeals to local councilors and more senior politicians, their efforts failed to make

any political waves.

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TamilNadu

Chennai

Kerala

Karnataka

AndhraPradesh

OrissaMaharashtra

I n d i a

Afghanistan

Pakistan

Myanmar

Sri

Lanka

Nepal

Bhutan

MadhyaPradesh

Gujarat

RajasthanUttar

Pradesh

Haryana

Punjab

Jammu&

Kashmir HimachalPradesh

1. Sikkim2. West Bengal3. Meghalaya4. Tripura5. Mizoram6. Manipur7. Nagaland

Uttarakhand

BiharBangladesh

ArunachalPradesh

Assam

1

2

3

4 5

6

72

Bay of Bengal

ArabianSea

Bay of Bengal

Not to scale

Chennai

Nungambakkam

Mambalam

Saldapet

Guindy

St. Thomas Mount

Chetput

Egmore

CorporationPark

Fort

ChennaiCentral

Basin BridgeCentral

Beach

Royapram

Washermanpet

Korukkupet

Tondiarpet

Perambur

Villivaakkam

BesantNagar

Figure 1. India Political Map Figure 2. Map of Chennai and Adyar River to the South

This was the story that was conveyed to me on an afternoon in January 2008 when I finally

visited what was left of Raja Gramani. What was so puzzling was that for eight months I had

been living in Chennai and following the work of a number of local non-governmental

organizations (NGO). Members of one NGO with whom I worked most closely had been active

opponents of the redevelopment of the Adyar River area. The project that caused them the most

indignation was the creation of the Adyar Poonga Eco-Park. It was this very project for which

land was being cleared at Raja Gramani. I had conducted numerous interviews with NGO

activists about the project. In addition to this, I had poured over pages of court documents and

petitions filed by NGOs in attempts to halt the construction of the Adyar Poonga. I also had

clipped and collected newspaper articles about the project and the opposition to it. None of these

sources ever mentioned Raja Gramani. While NGOs challenged the Poonga project on the basis

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of environmental sustainability and pushed for governmental accountability, the dramatic loss of

home and livelihood for the residents of Raja Gramani failed to make the local news.

The differing political priorities and strategies of the residents of Raja Gramani and the NGO

activists in my study suggest that sustainability is a contested concept. This is particularly

pronounced in the contradictions between urban livelihood issues and environmental restoration

and preservation in cities of the global South. Often the housing needs of the urban poor appear

incompatible with measures of environmental sustainability. In an ideal situation, the tensions

inherent to this incompatibility can be resolved through structures of urban governance. However

my case study shows that as more and new actors were enlisted in the governance of urban

development, these tensions became more pronounced. While the involvement of non-state

actors in the decisions about urban development is seen as an important step in the direction of

„good governance‟, in actuality this involvement has not always lead to more inclusive practices

of development. Thereby the role of civil society within the good governance agenda should be

reevaluated.

Good Governance and Civil Society

In the late twentieth century, good governance emerged as an important concept within the

development priorities and approaches of organizations like the World Bank. The concern with

good governance has emerged as a response to the failures of policies of economic liberalization

to reduce aid dependency and lead to high rates of economic growth in the global South

(Abrahamsen 2000; Mosely et al. 1991). One explanation for the poor performance of these

economies was the inability to attract external investment. Much of the timidity among investors

was attributable to fears over the lack of reliable, accountable, and transparent structures of

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governance, and a concern that investments would be unprotected and profits would be

consumed by corrupt governments. Thus by the late 1980‟s, World Bank documents came to

emphasize the importance of strengthening public institutions (World Bank 1989). While

initially the focus was on bolstering the democratic process with multi-party elections and

increasing voter turnout, as it has evolved within the policy prescriptions of the World Bank,

good governance has come to mean more a efficient, accountable, and transparent public sector

(Leftwich 1993). This renewed understanding of good governance has been accompanied by a

belief in the benefits of smaller, more responsive governmental institutions and with policies that

encourage greater citizen participation. This view is epitomized in the 1992 World Bank paper

on „Governance and Development‟ and developed further in subsequent World Bank documents

(World Bank 1992; World Bank 1994). In these documents, the Bank emphasizes the importance

of “transparency and accountability” to the creation of governmental institutions that are directed

toward meeting the needs of a common good. The emphasis on transparency and accountability

articulates a new relationship between the state and civil society, wherein civil society is seen as

an important vehicle that enables citizens to influence state institutions and hold them

accountable2. As such, civil society has emerged as a key component of good governance in the

global South, a point that is iterated in both the policy recommendations and official discourse of

the World Bank:

In cases where states are weak, or have failed, and are experiencing conditions of

social ungovernability, civil society organizations usually offer the institutional

basis for public service delivery and, in many cases, they contribute to conflict

resolution and reconciliation efforts crucial to achieving good governance and

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sustained development . . . [A] dynamic relationship between civil society and the

state sets the basic conditions of governance (World Bank 2003, emphasis added).

In this view, civil society organizations are perceived as capable of providing a more efficient,

locally sensitive, and inclusive model of development. Given the potential of civil society,

international aid and donor agencies have displayed a preference for civil society groups,

particularly non-governmental development organizations (NGO). In light of this development, it

is not surprising to find a growing interest in the contemporary role of civil society on the part of

scholars, policy makers, and governments. In the global South, the emergence of NGOs as key

players on the development scene has been the focus of much work within the social sciences

(see Alvarez 1999; Roy 2004; Nagar 2006; Sen 1999; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Schuller 2007;

Ferguson 2000; Pereira 2005).

Some of this work describes the success of NGOs in articulating the needs of marginalized

populations and bringing about social change (Bratton 1990; Keck and Sikkink 1998). But NGOs

have also attracted a fair deal of criticism. The enthusiasm around NGOs as the best routes to

civic empowerment, participation, and democratization has been challenged by the work of

numerous scholars and activists (Nagar 2006; Roy 2004; Morriss-Suzuki 2000). This work

focuses primarily on hierarchies within NGOs, the problematic ways in which “empowerment”

gets defined, and the funding structures that limit the scope for action of NGOs (ibid). In other

critiques, social service-oriented NGOs have been criticized as accompaniments to market

reforms because they are perceived as safeguarding poor populations from the “onslaught of the

market” (Tandon and Mohanty 2003, 13). Although these analyses paint a simplified and

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undifferentiated portrait of NGOs, they do suggest that the democratic potential of civil society is

ambiguous.

But it is not enough to say that the benefits of civil society are ambiguous. A more case-

sensitive, policy-oriented evaluation requires that we understand the more grounded, everyday

challenges that accompany the governance of development. Historically and geographically

contextualized data is necessary to understand how it is that urban development unfolds across a

terrain of inclusions and exclusions. Moreover, this type of understanding opens new doors for

envisioning a more inclusive approach to urban development.

The demolitions at Raja Gramani along the Adyar River offer a snapshot of the terrain of urban

development in Chennai, India. But less visible in this snapshot, although equally important, was

the culmination of several decades of shifting development priorities and approaches. One key

component of these shifts is the ascendency of the good governance paradigm within approaches

to urban development in Chennai.

Good Governance Goes Local

How is it that a commitment to good governance has been picked up within local urban

development practices? The World Bank has played an important role in translating its own

vision of good governance into the everyday functioning of the local state institutions.

Throughout the mid-late twentieth century, India was one of the Bank‟s most important

customers and the recipient of some of its largest national loan packages (Kapur et al. 1997).

However, in many instances World Bank programs have also bypassed the central state in favor

of dealing directly with city and state governments. Many of the Bank‟s good governance

reforms were promoted through projects implemented at these scales. In Tamil Nadu, where my

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case study is founded, the World Bank has been particularly active in promoting and funding

urban development-related projects. The Tamil Nadu Urban Development Fund (TNUDF) has

been created as an institutional vehicle for implementing these projects (Agenet et al.1985;

Vijaybaskar and Wyatt 2005). The TNUDF is an agency that represents a partnership between

the Government of Tamil Nadu, the World Bank, and Indian financial institutions. In this sense,

TNUDF is described as a para-state urban development agency. As a para-state agency,

TNUDF‟s primary task is to match public resources with financing raised from private capital

markets to fund urban infrastructure. The ongoing financial and institutional support of the

World Bank for these projects has been tied to TNUDF‟s compliance with reforms to urban

governance (Kapur et al. 1997). Furthermore, reforms to good urban governance makes

infrastructure finance a more attractive prospect for private investors.

Reforms in line with good governance include instituting new accounting practices and cost

recovery and implementing new systems of transparency and accountability. Participation on the

part of civil society groups has become central to this call for transparency and accountability.

Indeed, my interviews with the CEO and project managers at TNUDF revealed that World Bank

funding continues to be tied to the ability of TNUDF to illustrate that they are taking

accountability seriously. When the agency submits Detailed Project Reports to the World Bank

for approval, they are required to show that there has been an element of citizen participation and

consultation around the proposed development. Involvement on the part of NGOs was one key

piece of evidence used to show that the agency had indeed garnered citizen input. When asked

how TNUDF went about soliciting participation, one project manager commented:

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We have our NGOs, and they work with us to make sure, well to help us

find out whether a project is viable, socially. They also have a lot of

technical expertise that can be useful to us. And we have a good

relationship with our NGOs, mostly we are working toward mutual goals

(Author‟s Interview 11/14/2007, emphasis added).

Comments like this reveal that the ability to enlist “friendly” and allied NGOs was seen as

beneficial to TNUDF‟s capacity to formulate and execute its projects. However, what this quote

also suggests is that citizen participation may be limited by this designation of “our” NGOs. In

the first instance, citizen participation becomes equated with participation on the part of civil

society, and civil society is in turn reduced to NGOs. Furthermore, if only a select few

organizations are called upon to evaluate TNUDF‟s projects, the scope for true democratic

decision making around urban development is narrowed. The case of the Adyar River restoration

and redevelopment provides evidence of this narrowing. As a project undertaken by TNUDF,

and involving a variety of local NGOs, the creation of the Adyar Poonga Eco-Park3, provides a

potent example of how the good governance paradigm enacts particular notions of citizen

participation.

Who Participates? The case of the Adyar River Restoration and Redevelopment

The Adyar River is one of two large rivers flowing through the city of Chennai (see figure 2).

The river bisects the city and serves as the dividing line between north and south Chennai, a

distinction which is both geographical and social. Pushpa Arabindoo‟s research on the growth of

peri-urban Chennai shows how during the colonial period there was a marked tendency for

Europeans to retreat to garden estates in the Southern part of town. As a result,

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disproportionately large shares of municipal resources were funneled into roads and

infrastructure in the South, creating a distinctly southward growth corridor. In the years

following colonialism, elites in the city retreated from the increasingly congested center to

suburban locations growing ever further southward. In 1978 the Chennai Corporation extended

its boundary southward, bringing much of the hitherto scattered suburban growth into a more

formal city-planning grid and providing the early impetus for the development of urban land

markets in south Chennai (Arabindoo 2006).

In these early years, much of the development of residential plots was undertaken by the Tamil

Nadu Housing Board, or by families and individuals (Arabindoo 2006, 34). However in the

1980s, private developers began to enter the market. According to Arabindoo, the entry of

private developers was encouraged in tandem with policies of liberalization that enabled more

private sector involvement in the provision of urban housing (ibid, 35). Construction boomed in

the southern parts of the city, bringing new labor from both incorporated and far flung villages.

Migrant workers settled in areas close to their employment and developed relationships with

local bureaucrats and government officials, granting them some degree of land tenure4. As the

city expanded southward informal settlements grew up alongside new, more planned residential

developments. But as the southern parts of the city have filled in and land values have increased,

many of these settlements have moved onto public lands along the riverbanks and backwaters of

the Adyar River. While interviewing residents of one informal community in the Adyar River

area, one man told me:

We came here, some of us more than thirty years ago, mostly painters and electricians,

and this is where the work was. We built all these flats [gestures to the large, high-value

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condos surrounding his settlement], and we built homes where they left the construction

waste (Author‟s Interview 2/17/08, translated).

As a result of this rapid southward urbanization, today the Adyar River is considered one of the

most polluted waterways in India (Shanmugan et al. 2007). The concentration of industries in the

area, lack of proper drainage, illegal dumping, and human encroachment have all been identified

as causal factors (ibid). In its plans for redeveloping the area, the TNUDF describes the area as

follows:

All along the opposite bank are hutments with a continuous stretch of plastic waste

extending right into the water. Heavy silting on the creek bed has forced [its] waters into

a meandering course. Further to the north are the remnants of another footbridge. Most of

the footbridge has been removed and the whole place encroached by slums, narrowing

the breadth of the creek to just a few feet (Adyar Poonga 2010)5.

Adding to these concerns is the recognition of the Adyar River as a particularly sensitive

ecological area because its backwaters are home to a wide variety of flora and fauna. Moreover,

the estuary is seen as a crucial “sponge” for the city during the monsoons (Author‟s Interview

9/5/2007). Large scale flooding has plagued Chennai nearly every year, and most attribute this to

the lack of proper drainage and the in-filling of important watersheds (India Water Portal 2007)6.

Thus the restoration and redevelopment of the Adyar River is seen as a crucial step towards

building more environmentally sustainable cities in South Asia. The involvement of TNUDF

also means that the Adyar River is a model of contemporary approaches to the governance of

urban development.

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In 2003 the Government of Tamil Nadu made public their intent to create a fifty-eight acre

environmental preserve and ecological park along the Adyar Creek and Estuary and to call this

the “Adyar Poonga.”. In 2006, the Government of Tamil Nadu created the Adyar Poonga Trust

and in doing so consolidated fifty-eight acres of publically-owned land that had previously been

under the jurisdiction of various local state agencies including the Tamil Nadu Road

Development Corporation, the Public Works Department, and the Slum Clearance Board. The

Adyar Poonga Trust was to be managed by TNUDF, in coordination with various local

politicians and private sector experts. As managers of the Trust, TNUDF‟s first task was to enlist

a private consultant to conduct an environmental survey of the fifty-eight acres in question, and

to then draft a master plan for the park. The Pitchandikulum Forest Consultants, a group of

primarily foreign consultants operating out of Pondicherry to the south of Chennai, were

commissioned for the plan. The Pitchandikulum team immediately enlisted the input of a variety

of architects and designers, as well as academics and ecologists from domestic and international

firms and with these contributions drafted a plan for a world-class wetland Eco-Park that would

showcase the diverse ecology of the Coromandel Coast7. The plan entailed the creation of a

series of park-like amenities including walking trails, an interpretive center, children‟s

playground, amphitheater, and an orientation center (see Image 3).

Image 3: Photograph of artist’s conception of Adyar

Poona Eco-Park.

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But the plan has not been without its detractors. The environmental significance of the Adyar

River caused the Poonga to become a political rallying point for a number of local NGOs. One

NGO in particular, an organization called CAG (Citizen-Consumer and Civic Action Group) has

made the Adyar River of central concern. CAG (along with another local NGOs) has been the

petitioner in numerous legal complaints against the development plans for the river and the

surrounding wetland areas, culminating most recently in the legal appointment of CAG to a

committee assigned with monitoring the creation of the Adyar Poonga Eco-Park. Even in the

absence of a court order, TNUDF still actively solicited the input and approval of local NGOs.

This, combined with the ability of CAG to legally insert themselves into the decision making

process surrounding the Adyar Poonga, is evidence of the way in which some measure of citizen

participation has become common sense within the governance of urban development.

But the involvement of CAG also represents a more ubiquitous trend within urban governance in

Chennai toward equating citizen participation with the input of civil society groups. As an

organization, CAG may also be indicative of the potential exclusions inherent to these practices

of citizen participation. CAG became active in the debates about the restoration of the Adyar

River because of the organization‟s interest in environmental sustainability. This concern is part

of an emerging environmentalism in India. However, this environmentalism has attracted a fair

deal of criticism from academics and public intellectuals alike. At the core of these criticisms is

the charge that organizations like CAG represent a type of “bourgeois environmentalism”

(Baviskar forthcoming). For example, Amita Baviskar has described the ways an elite-led

environmentalism has ventured to influence the development agendas of cities like New Delhi.

Baviskar argues that instead of representing a concern with “material and distributive justice,”

bourgeois environmentalism concerns itself with the creation of parks and sanctuaries.

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According to Baviskar, this environmentalism is less about sustainability, and more of a “mode

of expressing and addressing their (middle-upper class) anxieties about themselves in relation to

their habitat” (Baviskar forthcoming, 8; Baviskar 2006). Much of the civic concerns of

bourgeois environmentalists are routed through the organizational form of NGOs. These groups

rely on their privileged access and cultural capital to file petitions with courts and wield the

power of the judiciary. Baviskar‟s observations serve as an apt description of the ways in which

CAG has engaged with the Adyar River restoration.

The exclusive nature of this type of environmentalism brings us back to the initial aim of this

paper which is to evaluate the impact of civil society involvement on more qualitative measures

of citizen participation. CAG offered important input about the environmental restoration that

was being implemented through the Adyar Poonga Eco-Park. In doing so, they challenged

TNUDF and its local governmental partners to institute more sound scientific and planning

practices. This input was an important check to what were at times aspirational and even

environmentally inappropriate plans of the Adyar Poonga Trust. However CAG was not the only

organization that contested the Adyar Poonga.

A residents‟ welfare association had been formed in the small neighborhood of Raja Gramani, an

informal settlement along a backwater of the Adyar River, and the northwestern edge of the

proposed Poonga park boundary. However, unlike CAG and its partner NGO, the residents‟

welfare association at Raja Gramani was not challenging the environmental principles of the

project. This newly formed citizen organization was formed around the threat of the loss of their

homes and livelihoods. The following account is culled from my interviews with the members

and leaders of this organization.

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Not long after the Corporation of Chennai announced in 2003 that it would be creating a fifty-

eight acre ecological park along a northern backwater of the Adyar River, the Corporation

contracted a private firm to construct a one-meter thick wall around most of this fifty-eight acres

(see Images 4 & 5). During the initial construction of this wall, roughly 20 homes were removed

at Raja Gramani, however the residents claim they were not notified of any further evictions.

However, in the year following the construction of the wall, a tsunami struck the city,

demolishing structures along the river, and temporarily reorienting the priorities of the city

government. Before the project could be resumed, the ruling party was voted out and the new

regime was less than eager to pick the project up. In 2006, the project was reactivated, but under

new guidance. It was at this point that the state government decided to create a land trust called

the Adyar Poonga Trust and transferred the initial 58 acres to that Trust. The creation of the land

trust was important because it consolidated land that was previously fragmented under the

purview of various local state agencies. The Adyar Poonga Trust also provided the institutional

framework for developing a master plan for the

development of the site. The Adyar Poonga could

never have been made a reality without this

recentralization of both authority and vision.

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Image 4: Children play atop the

wall constructed around the

Adyar Poonga Eco-Park

Image 5: View toward Raja Gramani from inside

the Adyar Poonga Eco-Park detailing demolition

site and security wall.

Although the formation of the Adyar Poonga Trust had constituted a major transfer of authority

over the site, the residents of Raja Gramani were completely unaware that such a change had

occurred. But this transfer was likely the single most significant event in determining the fate of

the residents‟ tenure on the land. Aside from setting in motion a development plan that would

ultimately disallow their continued occupancy of the site, the creation of the Trust also

effectively negated the residents‟ previous claims to land. Prior to the creation of the trust, the

Tamil Nadu Road Development Corporation, the Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance Board and the

Tamil Nadu Housing Board (TNHB) owned the area within the 58 acres. In my interviews with

residents they described the events that solidified their rights to the land upon which their homes

were built. Many of those who had been in the area longest (mostly members of the

neighborhood association) lived in houses built on land purchased in the 1970s from the Slum

Clearance Board. Some families even had sales receipts from this transaction, though not all

were successful at getting pattas, or land deeds, for their plots. Other people remembered when

in 1984 Raja Gramani Road was paved and regularized by the Tamil Nadu Road Development

Corporation, as another act of official recognition of the their residency. Furthermore, in 1993

Raja Gramani was the site of an upgrade scheme by the TNHB. Although TNHB projects were

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not inside the area now recognized as part of the 58 acre Poonga, the project brought amenities to

the area that benefitted homes both inside and outside this acreage. All residents claimed to have

been paying taxes on their land to the Chennai Corporation, though some admitted privately that

these taxes sometime were paid informally to ward officials or officials of the other involved

agencies. Prior to the demolitions, those people who did not have pattas had been actively

petitioning the relevant agencies for documentation of their tenure of the land. This was often

accomplished by appealing to local officials and agency bureaucrats with whom they had

developed relationships and who were familiar with the history of the area. The creation of the

Poonga Trust effectively severed these ties by re-vesting authority over the fifty-eight acres with

the Trust.

Residents told stories of how, in the in the months leading up to the second round of larger scale

demolitions, rumors circulated about the impending eviction. It was during this time that the

neighborhood association was formed. As an association, they approached their local councilor

with these concerns. She agreed to take their cause to the powers that be, and said that if the

demolitions proceeded she would resign her post. However, on more than one occasion, the

councilor used the residents‟ frustration for personal political gain. The residents even claim to

have been tricked into participating in an land rights protest, only to learn that they were being

called out in support of the councilor‟s allied political party. Frustrated, the association

approached the local political party, for whom they serve as a voting bloc. Again they were

allayed with promises and slogans, but little tangible support. The residents then staged a protest

along Karpagam Bridge. The location was strategic because the bridge bisects the wetland and

connects Raja Gramani to the more affluent neighborhoods where many work as domestic

laborers. The protest received no coverage and was quickly disbanded.

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What is most noteworthy in this narrative of political attempts and failures is the disconnect

between the organizational efforts of the residents of Raja Gramani, and the citizen participation

that was being enacted by the NGO CAG. This disconnect was realized when citizen

participation became a fixed set of relationships and practices that was relatively impervious and

contained within the monitoring committee. As a vehicle for citizen participation, CAG did not

raise objections to the social impacts or spatial injustices of the project. Instead, their emphasis

on environmental sustainability relocated debates about the Poonga into the courtroom and

eventually to the monitoring committee. While residents of Raja Gramani approached local

bureaucrats, the real conversations about the fate of their homes were taking place in this

committee. In my interviews with the NGO activists who had been appointed to the monitoring

committee, they claimed ignorance about the demolitions at Raja Gramani. One activist said:

You can‟t be a steward of everyone, but if that happened there its is really shameful. But

my God, as an organization we can‟t really get involved. There is a paralysis in this city

because of these politics too you know (Author‟s Interview 4/20/08).

Thus following a final round of public consultation at Anna University in January 2009, the final

draft of the Adyar Poonga Master Plan has been put forth bearing the stamp of a thorough and

inclusive public consultation. The Hindu reported that:

Discussions and public consultations to restore the ecology in Adyar by developing an

eco-park in the Adyar creek and estuary has (sic) been on for the last five months, in

which non-governmental organisations, technical experts and academicians have been

voicing their views. Though Friday‟s discussion did not see any vociferous outburst from

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the audience, participants made sure they drove home their apprehensions. (The Hindu

January 10, 2009).

Based on the media coverage and accounts laid out in the court documents held by both TNUDF

and the CAG, due diligence had been executed toward fostering citizen participation around the

Poonga project. As stated before, the ability to evidence this due diligence is importance for the

good governance agendas of World Bank-affiliated organizations like TNUDF. This point was

confirmed in an interview with a Poonga project manager at TNUDF who told me, “We are

following the Bank‟s protocol on all of this. It makes projects easier for the future” (Author‟s

Interview 11/14/2007).

Discussion

Citizen participation is a virtue that has been embraced within the good governance agenda at

both the rhetorical and practical levels. However the ability of this participation to represent and

act on behalf of the material needs of urban populations is uncertain. As it is currently defined,

citizen participation is often enacted through the involvement of civil society in the governance

of urban development. This involvement is important for bringing new concerns and insights to

bear on the decision making process. NGO input into the restoration and redevelopment of the

Adyar River is a case in point. This input was instrumental in expanding and critically evaluating

measures of environmental sustainability. However the ability of these organizations to represent

on-the-ground livelihood issues was limited.

Yet, in their struggles to meet basic needs, people have an amazing capacity for political

organizing. The formation of a residents‟ association at Raja Gramani, a neighborhood with little

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material resources and tenuous political connections, is a testament to this. For these people,

sustainability was not defined by the selection of flora and the design of footpaths, but the ability

to make a home and life in the city. Much of the nature of this livelihood was intimately linked

with the development of southern Chennai. The construction and growth of the city that had

occurred around the Adyar River resulted not only in environmental degradation, but also in the

formation of new land uses and land claims. This history was articulated by the Raja Gramani

residents‟ association, but failed to earn the consideration of the implementers of the Adyar

Poonga plan. Instead, the ways in which TNUDF and the NGOs understood how the Adyar

River and estuary were impacted by these developments was reduced to environmental

considerations.

What these differing views on the causes and solutions of urban environmental concerns indicate

is that sustainability is both an environmental and social concept. The causes of environmental

degradation are intimately bound up with the socio-economic fabric of cities in the global South.

As such, the ways in which these cities attempt to enact environmentally sustainable

development plans must also be attentive to these social factors. Definitions of sustainability

must be expanded. While civil society groups, particularly urban governance and environmental

NGOs, offer one set of inputs to this expanded notion of sustainability, they are not the only

mechanism for seeking out citizen participation. Housing and livelihood issues offer another

important platform upon which excluded urban populations can organize and offer input into the

development process. In the case of the Adyar River restoration and redevelopment, this type of

input was available; however, the good governance agenda that drove definitions of participation

for this project did not account for a greater diversity of citizen organizations. As a result, the

Adyar Poonga Eco-Park does not represent a sufficient model of inclusive development.

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Conclusion

This paper set out to evaluate the impact of civil society involvement in the governance of urban

development. While participation on the part of civil society groups is seen as integral to good

governance, this paper suggests that the form and quality of this participation should be

reevaluated. In doing so, it seeks to qualify citizen participation as a means for bringing the

material concerns of urban citizens to bear on the decisions about how to develop the city. The

demolitions that paved the way for the restoration and redevelopment of the Adyar River offer

insights into the injustices that can result from the urban development process. They also indicate

the limits to civil society-centered forms of citizen participation. The exclusions that were

fostered by this narrowly-defined citizen participation emerged out of both the ways in which

sustainability was being defined, as well as the ways in which participation was being enacted.

By limiting concerns with sustainability to environmental science, and by locating the process of

citizen participation in a formalized monitoring committee, the restoration and redevelopment of

the Adyar River engendered these exclusions. But the organizing efforts of the residents of Raja

Gramani offer evidence of the political potential inherent to housing and livelihood issues. The

ways in which these residents articulated a history of land occupancy that was intimately bound

up with urban economy and the growth of the city provided valuable insights into both the causes

and potential solution of environmental degradation. As such, the input of this type of citizen

organization has much to contribute to definitions of sustainability.

20

8

1 All Figures and Images are original and property of Rowan Ellis

2 Another interpretation comes from Ngaire Woods who argues that this concern with participation is really

a concern with measuring the success of Bank programs. World Bank studies have shown that programs

where there is a greater degree of participation and ownership on the part of program recipients is linked

with greater degrees of satisfaction with these programs (Woods 2000, 824).

3 Poonga means “leisure park” in Tamil.

4 Many of the settlements that grew up during the period of rapid urban expansion in India in the 1980s and

1990s were embedded in complex networks of production and local electoral politics. The significance of

these so called “vote-bank” politics is that many of these settlements become codified or “regularized”

through agreements with local politicians and bureaucrats wherein some form of tenancy is assured in

exchange for access to voter lists in municipal elections (Benjamin 2008).

5 http://www.adyarpoonga.com/english/index1.html: Accessed on 18 January 2010

6 http://www.indiawaterportal.org/ask/5214: Accessed on 18 January 2010

7 The Coromandel Coast is the name used to describe the southeastern coast of the Indian peninsula. The

name derives from the Chola Dynasty that ruled in South India until the 13th

century. Coastal areas were

called by the Tamil name Chola-mandalam, which is believed to have evolved into Coromandel following

the arrival of Europeans (Sastri 1971).

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