ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of the book. The book explores the misconception that the World Bank design is unique can be cleared up by referring to what Gandhi wrote in the 1930s and 1940s in defence of community participation, which he preferred to call Panchayati Raj, a design for localizing governance based on participatory democracy. Localizing governance is a device for democratizing governance. In a democracy this does not seem to be odd because this is a design to articulate popular aspirations in a well-defined ideological perspective, as is evident in India. The book expresses that democratic decentralization is not about mere structural innovation but also an ideological wave to make governance inclusive in its unalloyed form. It also expresses that since democracy is ideologically conceptualized, no derivative formula will work and efforts towards localizing governance need to be understood as a distinct contextual response within an overall ideological perspective.
