This chapter provides a description and an analysis of the relationship between government and the business sector, mostly large firms, a key aspect of Tanzanian development. The situation observed today, with a lack of a well-articulated industrial policy and the executives volatile attitude with respect to market rules and the role of big business, may be seen as strongly path-dependent in a country that went in a few decades from a colonial market economy to a socialist nationalized economy and then transitioned back to the market amid great disorder. The chapter emphasises several key challenges in the regulation of the business sector. The most important of these is the strong link between businesspeople and factions within the dominant political party, whose interests may diverge from those of the executive. The chapter elaborates on the need for better central control by the government to counteract this situation, while drawing the lessons of a move in that direction by the previous president. In her discussion of the chapter, Hazel Gray underscores the downsides of too much centralisation while emphasising the regional dimensions of Asian-led firms’ strategies.

This chapter explains the three core steps in the book’s argument about the power of scarce states. First, I begin by considering the potential for direct effects on society by a scarce state through the distribution of state resources. Second, I suggest that isolated state actions can have effects through a more indirect channel as well. Third, I describe how the societal changes produced – directly or indirectly – by isolated state actions have downstream consequences for who wields political authority and how local actors contest for political power.

This chapter provides an introduction to the main argument, evidence, and contributions of the book.

Chapter 1 introduces the central puzzle of implementing primary education in northern India, a least likely setting for programmatic service delivery. Despite having the same formal institutions and national policy framework for primary education, implementation varies remarkably across northern Indian states. After reviewing existing explanations, the chapter outlines the main argument, anchored around variation in informal bureaucratic norms, and foreshadows the theoretical contributions to comparative politics and development. It then presents the research design and methods, based on multilevel comparisons in four Indian states (Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Bihar). Using multiple field research methods, I trace the implementation process from state capitals down to the village primary schools, drawing on two and a half years of field research: participant observation inside bureaucracies; village ethnography; and 853 interviews and 103 focus group discussions. I conclude with an overview of the book’s remaining chapters.

Chapter 9 concludes the book by outlining its contributions to scholarship in comparative politics, development and public administration. The theoretical framework centered on bureaucratic norms brings institutionalist perspectives on the state and social policy together with insights on street-level bureaucracy and local collective action. The conceptual interweaving of meso-level state institutions with the micro-politics of frontline service delivery gives rise to a new understanding of bureaucracy and its relationship to human development. The chapter also explores the study's policy implications for the reform of bureaucracy, public services and primary education in developing countries.

Chapter 3 sets the stage for the book's study of implementation. It explores the policy and institutional terrain of primary education in India, examining the political currents beneath India's sluggish expansion of primary education policy. It also presents the legal and administrative architecture for policy implementation. Based on interviews and archival materials, I find that the adoption of universal primary education policies was driven by elite politics inside the state. Committed state officials gradually expanded their authority, using administrative levers to institutionally layer reforms on top of the existing education system. As the Indian economy liberalized in the 1990s, reformers drew on World Bank fiscal and technical assistance to scale up reforms across the country. The argument builds on theories of gradual institutional change, highlighting the agency of committed state elite. The findings also suggest the limitations of institutional layering in India's education system, which failed to address weak administrative capacity and problems of local accountability.

Chapter 2 presents the book’s theory connecting differences in bureaucratic norms to variation in the implementation of primary schooling. I first define implementation and operationalize it for the primary education domain. I then present comparative education indicators, showcasing differences in performance across four Indian states. Next, I develop a theory anchored around the ideal types of legalistic and deliberative bureaucracy. I argue that deliberative bureaucracies, which promote flexibility and problem-solving, are more effective since they can adapt policies to local needs and activate participation from marginalized communities. By contrast, legalistic states, which adhere strictly to rules and procedures, implement policies unevenly and tend to benefit privileged groups in society, weakening the engagement of poor communities. I elucidate two mechanisms: collective understanding and behavior of state officials, and societal feedback, which together yield varied mentation patterns and outcomes. I explore the political origins behind the differences in bureaucratic norms. I scope conditions of my theory and contrast it with alternative political explanations for the implementation of public services.

Chapter 4 examines the book’s main protagonists – India’s slum leaders. I first draw on my ethnographic fieldwork and survey data to explore the strategies that residents use to claim public services. I find that India’s slum residents primarily orient their collective action toward the state, in the presence of informal slum leaders, to improve local conditions. The chapter then establishes the pervasiveness of slum leaders and their central place in local distributive politics. Next, it describes how slum leaders climb into their positions of informal authority, the material incentives that motivate them to make this gritty political ascent, and the diverse problem solving activities they perform for residents. I then argue that slum leaders must demonstrate efficacy to build a following – the base upon which they collect rents, attract patronage, and seek party promotion. The chapter subsequently describes the subset of slum leaders who have become party workers, absorbed into party organizations, and given positions within their hierarchies.

Chapter 1 motivates the central puzzle of the book: Despite a shared context of informality, patronage politics, and discretionary state institutions, India’s slum settlements are not uniformly marginalized in the distributive politics of the city. Instead, they exhibit dramatic variation in their capacity to organize and push the state to extend basic public services. The chapter begins with two vignettes that illustrate divergences in settlement organization and development. It then draws on official data and my own survey findings to establish wide variation in access to public services across India’s slums. Next, the chapter provides an overview of the book’s theoretical framework and foreshadows its contributions to several literatures in the field of comparative politics. Next, it positions the study at the intersection of several literatures and establishes why extant theories are insufficient in explaining inter-settlement variation in public service delivery. Next, the chapter defines the specific type of slum under study – squatter settlements – and introduces Jaipur and Bhopal. It then turns to the research design and data and concludes by mapping the remaining chapters.

Chapter 8 concludes. It revisits the substantive and theoretical motivations of the book and provides a brief summary of its main findings. The chapter then expands on the contributions of the book to our understanding of democracy and development in India and other rapidly urbanizing countries in the Global South, and subsequently discusses the book’s implications for the design and implementation of community-driven development programs.

Chapter 7 examines the formation of party worker networks, and the reasons why they vary so remarkably in their density and partisan distribution across settlements. The chapter presents quantitative evidence that key drivers of variation in party worker density are ethnic diversity and settlement population. Higher levels of social diversity increase the fractionalization of informal leadership within a settlement. Over time, parties attempt to bring slum leaders into their fold, increasing party network density in the process. The second is the population of the settlement. A slum’s population – the size of its “vote bank” – determines electoral incentives for parties to extend scarce patronage resources and positions to maximize votes.The chapter then takes an additional step backward, probing why settlements vary in their populations and levels of ethnic diversity in the first place. I find that idiosyncratic features of the urban geography and constraints over where poor migrants settle influence settlement size and ethnic diversity, providing analytical leverage in explaining their impact on party organization and, in turn, public services.

Chapter 2 situates the book in the context of a rapidly urbanizing India. It describes India’s demographic shift to cities and towns since Independence in 1947 and the concurrent proliferation of slum settlements. The chapter further outlines the formal institutions of governance in India’s post-decentralization cities and the sources of public finance that are used to provide services to slums. It then goes on to delineate the mediated, nonprogrammatic environment in which slum residents seek access to public services. The chapter ends with a description of the organizational structures of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Indian National Congress (INC) in Bhopal and Jaipur and how they have percolated neighborhoods.

Chapter 5 presents ethnographic narratives from eight case study settlements – four from Jaipur and four from Bhopal. The narratives trace the emergence of informal authority, party linkages, and public service delivery in each settlement, from the initial period of squatting to the present. In addition to demonstrating the mechanisms underpinning the book’s theoretical framework, the narratives address issues of historical sequencing and causality.

Chapter 6 quantitatively tests the theoretical framework with survey data from 111 squatter settlements. I find that party worker density is positive and statistically significant in its association with paved road coverage, streetlight coverage, municipal trash removal, and the provision of government medical camps. These findings hold when controlling for a wide range of potential confounders and are robust to several model specifications and post-estimation tests. Read alongside my qualitative findings, these statistical relationships provide further evidence that denser concentrations of party workers are associated with higher levels of public service provision.

Chapter 3 presents the book’s theoretical framework. It explains why settlements with dense concentrations of party workers are better positioned to demand public services than those with thin or absent networks. The discussion is set around three mechanisms undergirding this relationship: political connectivity, mobilization capacity, and the informal accountability generated by competition among party workers for a following. The chapter further considers the implications of having party workers affiliated to competing parties, which I argue has several countervailing influences on public service delivery. Next, the chapter takes a step backward in the sequencing of events and asks why settlements vary in the density and partisan balance of their party workers. I argue that two variables – settlement population and ethnic diversity – shape bottom-up incentives for residents to engage in party work and top-down incentives for parties to extend their organizational networks.