Policy Making in India: A Dynamic Process of Statecraft

This paper problematizes the concept of the state by studying its role and interactions with society in the realm of making policy. To achieve this, the case of a recently formulated social policy in India, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), is examined. The paper provides empirical evidence of policy making as a complex and iterative process, which is mediated by a multiplicity of actors who operate in relation to each other. In tracing the formulation process of the NREGA, theoretical claims regarding the understanding of the state as an ideological construct as well as comprising of material practices are substantiated. The paper sees policy making as an act of governing, and contributes to ethnographic understandings of fuzzy and porous boundaries between the state and society that are redefined through the act of policy making. This dynamism, it is argued, results in the two-dimensional phenomenon of statecraft: how the state pursues policy making as a strategy for governing its population, and in turn, how the state itself gets reconstituted in the making of policy.

政策制定在印度：治國之術的動態過程

通過攷察印度最近製訂的一項社會政策－－全國農村就業保障法案（NREGA），本文研究在政策製訂領域裏國家的角色及其與社會的互動，並進而質疑國家這一概念。本文提供的實證顯示，政策制定是一個複雜而反復的過程，由其運作彼此相連的多重行動者斡旋其中。本文對NREGA形成過程的追溯表明，國家是意識形態構建的產物並由物質實踐組成。本文將政策製訂看作一種治理行為，並認為政策制定行為重新定義了國家與社會之間模糊而滲透的界線。這種動態關係導致了治國之術的兩維現象：國家一方面緻力於政策制定將其作為治理其人口的策略，另一方面國家本身在政策制定中也被不斷地再組成。