Making local government’s value clear: Interview with Mekhala Krishnamurthy

As part of our interview series for Future Local Lab, LGIU’s Dr. Greg Stride interviews Mekhala Krishnamurthy, Associate Professor of sociology and anthropology at Ashoka University, India. Mekhala shares her journey into public policy and her work on the State Capacity Initiative, as well as the diversity of perspective within India’s local government, the importance of building everyday capacity to prepare for crises and why it’s integral local government make its value clear.

Mekhala Krishnamurthy is one of LGIU’s top 25 thinkers in local government. Make sure you check out the rest of the list.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube here

01:22: Mekhala’s journey into public policy
07:40 Local governance in India compared to the world
12:39 Understanding state capacity and its importance
18:08 Perspectival diversity within India’s local government
21:54 Building everyday capacity for greater government efficiency
25:46 Local government and its approach to the local economy
30:23 Making local government’s value clear

Looking for just the highlights? A written version of the interview has been edited down into a Q&A format, which you can read below.

Before we get started on the discussion, could we take a second to talk a bit about your career journey, please? Where did your interest in public policy and government come from, and how did your career begin?

It’s really such a pleasure to meet and to have a chance to talk to you. It’s also been a privilege to be part of this group. Nobody ever likes to talk too much about being part of any list, I think, beyond a point, but it was really exciting. I think everyone realised how distinctive it was in terms of not just the number of women but how many locally embedded innovators were part of the group.

I think that’s very exciting because we’re usually part of a common tribe, and I think what you realise when you look at local government is that there’s so much diversity in terms of the kinds of people who believe in local government. So I’ll just start with a little thank you for including me in that wonderful, wonderful group.

So, as for my career, I was thinking about this, particularly because we are talking about local government. If I think back to high school and early college, which is when I would have started cultivating these interests. I think I might have thought I was going to work much more in global institutions, in looking at sort of large-scale multilateral organisations. I think we were looking, in the 1990s, at a time where there was so much war, there was so much conflict. As a young student, I think I invested a lot in the idea that the UN could actually solve things.

I thought I would study international economics and international relations. And with all respect to those disciplines and to colleagues of mine who work in them, as I got into university, I realised it was all very theoretical and slightly even boring in its theory. Not just theoretical, but not persuasive.

I found myself actually engaging much more with the ways in which all these huge global issues are really local, because ultimately they only manifest locally, and they only make sense locally and regionally and nationally. So, I found myself more and more drawn into disciplines like sociology and anthropology, even into social history. That’s interesting to me. I think the local as a concept is actually hugely universal. It suffers from the problem that people think it is actually localised because of the term local. So when we say I work on universal concepts, people just assume that you’re working on some large-scale, big, relevant concept. When you’re working on the local, you’re somehow grounded in some local. But the idea of local, including local government, most of all, is the ultimate universal concept, I think, but somehow gets this challenge of people seeing that. I think that’s quite interesting because to me, I was drawn to the local because none of the global issues I wanted to work on made sense, except in local context.

Then very specifically, I discovered local government and its importance as a fourth year in college, when I had a little grant to go and study women’s courts in Gujarat, a state in India. These were local courts. Informal local justice institutions that were created by poor rural women because of the problems with the mainstream judicial system, particularly for violence against women, local divorce cases and things like that.

It had been set up by a government organisation but had then flourished into these independent women’s groups, which took support from the State and worked with the community. They were organisations that quintessentially shuttled between State and community to make things work. They worked a lot with the local police and these kinds of organisations. So, I was thrown into the world of thinking about local organisations through their work and their very interesting relationship, being in government and outside government, and moving in between the two.

Then I ended up working on the everyday life of Bombay policemen. I grew up in Mumbai and the police in that city have a very famous reputation in Bollywood films; they’re quite a caricatured group and I got very interested in the popular representations in the personal life of the police. That was the second way in which I was studying this. A whole different set of contradictions emerged about these frontline workers who are in uniform and are meant to safeguard the streets and deliver law and order, but often buy substitute pairs of their uniform from illegal street hawkers because the state gives them only one or two pairs of uniforms. So when they run out, who provisions them? The local illegal vendors.

The policeman would say, ‘now the joke is we’re going to go wear the uniform and then shoo them off the street, but we wouldn’t have the spare uniform if they didn’t provide it to us’. So these contradictions were just bubbling all over the place. I was realising the importance of better understanding these dynamics. Then I worked on public health for a few years. My doctoral work was on local markets, agricultural markets in central India. There I was looking at frontline regulators.

So over the years, I think just through that first work, I’ve just followed the lives and careers and contributions and contradictions of frontline workers. Then, through them, I discovered the complexity of the state and the community interactions.

Yeah, that’s really interesting. Seeing the global in the very local and even the very individual, I think that’s something that we can really identify with. That’s actually what I want to ask about next is that lots of your work, as you’ve referenced there, has been based in India, where you’re based. And I was wondering, what do you see as being specific about the local in India? And what do you see as being more globally applicable about your research in India?

I mean, it’s so interesting, I think it’s the same problems again. So, as anthropologists, one of the ways we address this is by saying that when you study anything fully, you know the parts that can travel and the parts that are grounded. So I think in any good story, no matter how local, and in fact the more local and the more grounded and the more complete you are in contextualisation, the more comprehensive you can be. And that comprehensiveness can travel. Certain elements will travel and certain elements won’t.

With India, it’s a huge country and it’s an old country. So we end up having a lot of conversations, as people who work in India and as Indian citizens, about exceptionalism. We actually don’t feel like we need to often look at the whole world too much, right? Because we’re so diverse and we’re so complex. This is one of the biggest problems of taking lessons anywhere in India. The big joke, and all of you working as bureaucrats will completely relate to this, but whenever we go and take an idea from another place to a different context in India, like from one state to another, they’ll be like, it won’t work. What worked in Madhya Pradesh will not work in Punjab. Why are you telling me about this place? This is not my context. We get this a lot.

For those of us who work with government, the big secret is that we always let government think it’s their idea, because everybody has to come to it themselves. I think ownership is really important and in that sense, India, like anywhere else, believes its problems to be very unique.

But I think more of it can travel, more of it can be cross-fertilised and we can learn. I think where there is a specific challenge is that the diversity is enormous. The size of the population is remarkable. It is the world’s largest democracy. There’s federalism andlocal government and, a really complex dynamic of federalism and decentralisation in a country like India, which is also a union of states.

Those histories of federalism are quite unique. They’re very different and comparative to federalism as it has emerged, as well as the questions of the decentralisation of emergency in the United Kingdom or in the United States.

Then I think the fact that we are still, from an employment perspective, enormously dependent on agriculture. To the point where n average, you’re still looking at 40% employed in agriculture, which is not the great structural transformation story that was supposed to happen, but that we’re endlessly frustrated also about. But that is the reality. Agriculture is still central to the majority of Indian lives and is still vastly an informal economy.

This is something that, again, the informal economy is everywhere, but the scale of the informal economy in India is very distinctive. Then, of course, every country has its own ways of thinking about class and hierarchy, and experiencing those. So, political economy, caste, and gender in each state have different complexities. Some are matrilineal, we have patrilineal systems, land laws, there’s lots. Then we share with countries that have had colonial legacies, long histories of post-colonial transitions. So there are many things that relate to other things.

A person in this local market said, they’re very much like people that they share DNA. All the markets are actually very, very, very similar, but they all have dramatically different personalities. Sometimes you don’t really believe that they belong to the same species. I always felt, for the first six months that I did research, when I picked them, I thought, okay, they’re all quite similar. Then, when I did research for six months, I thought there is no place on earth like this, this is so particular. Then, about 18 months into it, I kind of knew the ways in which it was general and the ways in which it was particular. So that’s how I think of all research anywhere, including research in India.

I think that ability to take different perspectives, to zoom in and zoom out, is really what makes local work so interesting, because you can look across the globe or you can focus on your neighbour and you’ll get such a different story. To focus on a specific project that you’ve been working on, I’d be interested to hear more about the State Capacity Initiative. What is state capacity and what work have you been doing on it?

There’s a lot of academic discussion. Is it state capacity? Is it state capability? What’s the difference between state capacity and state capability? How is it different from thinking about it as public administration? Then there are very different views. Like one is state capacity is a state’s ability to carry out its own goals. Does the state have the capacity to do that? But then we know states are complex and, in a larger sense, quite capable of great violence. Yes, legitimate violence, but also that. And that state projects may not be inclusive at any given point.

For us at the State Capacity Initiative, we didn’t want to think of capacity as just something technical. So, it’s not just about, can you raise enough revenue? Can you deliver enough services? But actually, to be organisational, to think about what are the kinds of arrangements of money, human resources, organisations and organisational relationships and networks. Plus, what kind of relationships and participation do you need from citizens to actually make state capacity something which is normative as well as technical? I think for us, that’s why it’s about democratic and federal India. It’s not about just building state capacity anywhere, or in any way, but in keeping those principles, whether they are constitutional, whether they’re questions of what does it mean to be inclusive, what does it mean to be a country which actually believes in federalism and democracy, and then to design our institutions.

Particularly in India, because of the size and scale, we always hear that what India needs is a benevolent dictator. We want that order. It’s this idea that India’s too messy, that democracy is too noisy, and it’s very difficult to be efficient in that context. For us, state capacity isn’t about efficiency alone. It’s about a government that understands its role and purpose and then builds institutions, organisations, systems, relationships, and nurtures those that make that possible. Sometimes that’s not the most efficient answer, but in terms of concrete work, we focused a lot of our work on what we call the people of the state. Usually, we think of government employees or we think about citizens as the people of the country. But the people of the state are those who are government employees, both permanent, temporary and contracted, and we wanted to understand the people, the organisations and then the relationships with citizens, the relationship of state and society. This was what the initiative was broadly about.

We did a lot of work with civil servants, unlike in the United Kingdom, for example, where civil servants are interviewed; India has a higher civil service, the Indian Administrative Service, but they are not often interviewed. One of the first things we did in the initiative was actually do a very interesting survey during COVID in two rounds of the higher civil services to actually understand norms and values.

So for us, state capacity didn’t start with: Do you have enough revenue? Or, can you adjust the fiscal arrangements? (Although the fiscal arrangements are critical). It also began with questions of norms, values, and organisational purpose. And then a set of critical questions around regulation, regulatory design and capacity. We used to run a program called Know Your Regulator, because in India, like everywhere else, everybody’s all about know your customer in banking regulations. But we thought, do you know your regulators? Do you know who they are and how they’re structured, and the regulatory agencies? Also, do the regulators know themselves?

One interesting thing is that regulatory organisations often decentre core public purpose. If we ask them what they do, they’ll tell you a lot of what they do. But, why do you do what you do, which is the actual core purpose around which you build it, sometimes gets decentered. So we were returning to some of those questions. We worked a lot on regulatory design and capacity on federalism and its institutions. So federalism and decentralisation and those dynamics. Most of it, when you think about it in formal language, sounds very dry because people think it’s the dreaded term, ‘administrative reforms’. But, these are really at the heart of making government purposeful and accountable and effective. This was the kind of work that we were doing, working with researchers across different fields, from lawyers and engineers, anthropologists, sociologists, economists, political scientists, and geographers. Then, also working with bureaucrats in different states, some retired, some in service, working at different levels to kind of illuminate these dynamics. Plus working with civil society and public organisations, and associations.

A couple of questions that really popped up in my head from that. The first one would be, there any examples that really stick with you from your research of the state capacity, anybody you spoke to that really stays with you? And the second one, is there anything that really surprised you?

When we’re thinking about these conversations about why it’s so hard to make things visible, one of the regulators said, you only notice regulators when things break down and you think we’re very non-dynamic, but to be a regulator, to keep things going requires remarkable dynamism. That’s actually where we are dynamic. I think a lot of it’s about what we don’t notice about government work.

I think some of the survey results were really interesting because there was actually an interesting split. There was about 50/50% of the Indian Administrative Service that had differences of opinion on whether you should plan or react. Everybody said planning is better, but then, when it came to what actually worked, it was reaction. Similarly, there was this really interesting tension between those who felt it was public cooperation that really helped in COVID versus fear of coercion. I don’t think we expected 50% – 45/55 – it was that kind of divergence.

At the same time, you know, when you asked them, if you have a problem, should you be able to reassign your work? It was very service-driven. The overwhelming majority said you had to show up to work. There was no question of, in a pandemic, having vulnerabilities or anything else. You are a government servant, you show up to work. I don’t think any of the officers, nobody was surprised.

So there was a huge amount of service motivation. I think people underestimate how much people do think in those terms. But when it came to core things like planning versus reaction, coordination and cooperation versus coercion, to me, if 50% have a difference of opinion on which one is actually making the difference, how do you design and work with government? Or with people?

What’s been most interesting is when we present this material to them, or we make a room full of officers take the same survey, and share the results immediately. I think they’re quite surprised. The norms and values aren’t quite as shared.

I think it raises a really interesting question about what kinds of areas do you want diversity in? There’s lots of conversation today in light of what’s happening in the United States on perspectival diversity. Diversity of perspective is really important. But how much do you need to share core values? And what are shared core values when you’re looking at questions of faith in the public? Or how you relate to the public, or other things like that? So this was quite interesting and surprising. I think we have lots of examples of surprisingly effective innovation at various points in time. But whether they last, and how long they last, and whether we build institutions that can actually work over time, and how to maintain them? That’s always a question.

That’s really interesting. I think what you were saying there about these shared values and particularly about shared missions, these things that we’re all driving towards. A couple of those that spring to mind immediately are the reaction to climate change and the changing economies. I was wondering if in any of your work whether you ever look at anything to do with the challenges to future economies and sustainability? Or anything along those lines? These like big challenges that hit everybody or are going to hit everybody, but in different ways. Is that anything that you’ve looked at in your work?

I think the pandemic was a very interesting moment. So many people did reflect on this and the role of the state itself. There’s really interesting work about this, but what immediately springs to mind in the US context is Michael Lewis’s Fifth Risk. The fifth risk is losing what you didn’t know could save you, and I think government is full of that. What’s been very interesting in our work is looking at what does it mean to build up that type of capacity. We’ve seen this in the work of Mariana Mazzucato, but also with Michael Lewis, this idea that government actually takes risks, but also does things that others don’t do.

So I think actually many routine functions of government are precisely the functions that kick into action during a crisis. Dr. Sundaram, a person I do very close work with on public health, often talks about this. About how if you can’t take care of one house when it falls, in disaster management. How are you going to do it when all of the houses are falling at the same time? So for government efficient working isn’t 100%.

When you’re working in government, you actually don’t want organisations all working at 100%. They should be working at 70 – 80% efficiency, so that they have that inbuilt surge capacity when they need to respond to a crisis. In our work, in Orissa a state in India, which was very bad with cyclones and disaster relief,  we’ve seen remarkable improvements in disaster planning and emergency response. For me I’ve been thinking about what it means to be efficient. Efficiency thinking has to have a very different kind of understanding when you’re dealing with crisis because you need to have give. You need to have capacity to ramp up at a certain point. There is some very interesting thinking happening India right now about, how does one think about these questions and build your everyday capacity.

It’s very funny because when people say mission in the UK, I think they mean purpose. To work in a mission mode. As a person who works on state capacity in India, I get very worried with mission mode. I like to think about everyday work because I find it very unsettling to talk about mission-driven everything. Because then you have this simulated ‘pushing everything together to solve the problem’ approach, but that’s not how daily life and interconnections work. Things are much more embedded, much more local. I actually think the quotidian has to work well for us to be able to respond really well in crisis and plan for a crisis because you have much greater visibility on how things are involved. But we find it very difficult to generate energy around the quotidian, the everyday, the staple. So we want missions, and I get very nervous.

I love the thinking around belief in government and pushing for public value. But sitting in India, I almost feel we do too many missions. We do vertical programs well, rather than comprehensive programs. We do it precisely because we don’t decentralise. I think that’s an interesting tension, do we need more missions to deal with crisis or do we need a better everyday capacity?

I was just wondering, looking to the future, if we look over the next 40, 50, 60 years. What other challenges do you see that it’s likely that the sort of state and the local state will have to take on? And do you have any reflections on how it might be likely to respond to those challenges?

I think there are two things that I think are very interesting. One is the problem of local economies. And I was telling right at the beginning that India is a very informal economy and we are small scale, we have a large number of small producers, small consumers and small intermediaries.

One of the really important challenges for our thinking on government and thinking of public purpose is going to be, how do we approach the economy? Do we think about the economy as something that has to be managed at the monetary level and then left to markets, largely deregulated? Or do we actually believe the government is not just a regulator coming in for market failures, but actually has to multiply value and give people the opportunity.

I mention this because in a country like India, agriculture is often thought of as a welfare sector, but it is the largest employment generator. I think across the world, we are having a really significant challenge. I teach a class on the welfare state where we actually start by reading these two different texts. The first is the history of the making of the welfare state in Britain, which is Chris Renwick’s Bread for All. Then we move to the 21st century and to Jim Ferguson’s very interesting work on the politics of distribution, Give a Man a Fish. And we’re asking this question: how did we go from Bread for All, which was about workers, employment, and contributory welfare, to Give a Man a Fish, which is actually about cash transfers and distribution? I think it’s got to do with whether we believe people will actually have jobs. For instance, you can’t teach a man to fish if there are no jobs being produced in the economy. This is a pre-AI story. India has had something we have called jobless growth for a long time because we started moving and building, and gaining from services. Manufacturing didn’t grow in the way that we had anticipated and there are many, many complex reasons for that, and then agriculture still remains vital. Agriculture is this great sponge but also it’s not giving people incomes.

I think for local economies, local government and for government at all scales, the question is, how are they going to approach this? I think the cash transfer story has a very particular challenge for local government because cash transfers are now moving directly from central accounts of government to people. Earlier, a lot of this was actually mediated by local government.

This is a great moment where we are thinking a lot about disintermediation. Taking middlemen out of the scene, but actually, middlemen play very important roles and economies collapse when you remove too many middlemen without understanding their role. They’re also deeply invested in local politics and local societies, and local economies – so that’s a challenge. Again, here, of course, you don’t want brokers and you don’t want people having been dominated and taking their job cards, taking all of that. Understood. But at the same time, you can’t keep bypassing the local government and deliberative systems because you can reach people directly now.

I think climate is a huge challenge and there are going to be so many massive challenges. But I think the bigger challenge is how we view this dynamic of disintermediation and diversification in our societies, in our economies, and in our governments. How do we realise what we are going to lose if we don’t actually have some collective structures for problem-solving?

A lot of my new work with colleagues Rahul Sharma and Dan Honig is on relational capacities. How do you build and recenter relationships and really build up the stock of what we’re calling relational state capacity, which is what happens every time a state agent and a citizen look at each other with mutual recognition of their humanness. To me, this is actually the bigger challenge. I think how we handle technical challenges will be critical, whether those are questions of technology and AI, or questions of new public health techniques and vaccinations or climate. The technical and the administrative will have to be thought through much more creatively, but I think if we disintermediate too much, too fast, too soon, I think that’s the challenge that local governments are going to really, really face.

What advice would you give those local leaders who are going to be facing this challenge?

The hardest thing is making your value clear. Government is not good at making its own value clear, where it really matters. It’s good at showing brute strength power, all the things only government can do at scale, but its ability to communicate what it actually does well is the big challenge.

It’s like the person who said, you only notice me when things break down. You can’t support something you only notice when it breaks down. However, the private sector does this very well. It advertises itself, and it’s not just advertising and marketing, but its ability to convince people of a narrative.

I recently had a conversation with people in government and they thought this private enterprise doing health service delivery was doing a great job. They thought they were doing doorstep delivery of drugs, even though that place was closing down at five o’clock in the evening. But somehow in our minds, we had already assumed they were doing doorstep delivery. Plus, the one qualified doctor who visited that private entity was the government doctor who went on the Saturday to the private clinic to help them out. So, it was actually the government that provided this person. But the narrative was completely different in terms of what was actually working.

I think government really struggles to make its value apparent. I think it’s not just about being on social media and being part of the buzz of it, and maybe that’s somewhat part of it too – I do think communication is a huge part. But it is more substantive than that. To me, that is like the single biggest challenge we face is the persuasion. We have to be able to persuade people before it’s too late.

This interview is part of LGIU’s new Future Local Lab – a holistic programme of resources aimed at helping you to prepare for and respond to the emerging challenges facing local government everywhere. It’s open to everyone, make sure you’re signed up today.