Premium
Foot‐march: Large‐scale mobilization for a public cause or a tool for fanning political ambition
Author(s) -
Agarwalla Astha,
Gupta Ishu,
Sarin Ankur
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
journal of public affairs
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.221
H-Index - 20
eISSN - 1479-1854
pISSN - 1472-3891
DOI - 10.1002/pa.1895
Subject(s) - politics , mobilization , citizen journalism , mediation , corporate governance , public space , visibility , political science , public administration , scale (ratio) , political economy , space (punctuation) , state (computer science) , sociology , economics , geography , law , engineering , management , architectural engineering , linguistics , philosophy , cartography , algorithm , meteorology , computer science
We present the case of an awareness campaign, strategically crafted by a local student political leader, based on a national level policy for urban poor and marginalized, in the city of Ahmedabad in India. The campaign, designed in the form of a foot‐march, was aimed at mobilizing the urban poor, but with a clear ambition of gaining visibility for political mileage. This study reinforces that the mediation role taken up by local leaders transcends the traditional policymaking, in democracies with blurred boundaries between the state and citizens. Further, in local governance structures, with weak participatory spaces for the poor, foot‐marches have the potential to become an extended invited participatory space.