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Participatory Democracy or ‘Transformative Appropriation’? The People’s Planning Campaign in Kerala

Abstract This article seeks to make sense of a widely acclaimed political experiment in decentralisation and people-centred development in Kerala of the 1990s, the People’s Planning Campaign, by placing it within a wider contemporary history of politics in the region. Much celebratory literature on this experiment has tended to view it as essentially an extension of pre-existing political initiatives in the state associated with mainstream left parties. Moving away from this view, the present analysis views it as a political response of the mainstream left to various challenges it faced in the early 1990s, to throw light on the many contradictions of political decentralisation in Kerala. Further, it reflects on ‘glocalisation’ of participatory democracy in Kerala and the subject-positions it has produced.