Cultivating a Market Like the State: Rural Development and Democratic Decentralization in India

Global policy organizations, financial institutions, and national governments have emphasized high-value agriculture in the world’s semi-arid areas inhabited by the greatest proportion of its poor, stressing linking households to markets to improve their well-being. This is assumed to involve state withdrawal and the ascendance of self-evident market forces. By means of ethnographic fieldwork in semi-arid western India, this paper discusses how the market does not arise spontaneously, but is deepened through state intensification. Rural households are imbricated with new markets by the state’s rendering of development policy market-driven, and through democratic decentralization, which has emerged as an instrument to facilitate the penetration of market actors into remote rural communities.