Capturing Institutional Change: The case of the Rights to Information Act in India

Seminar abstract

This book this seminar is based around, examines the what, why, and how of institutional change through the lens of transformation in the ‘information regime’ in India by tracing the passage of the Right to Information Act (RTIA), 2005.

The volume explains institutional change from an alternative historical institutional perspective.

Using archival material, internal government documents, and interviews, this study demonstrates that the institutional change resulted from ‘ideas’ emerging gradually and incrementally, leading to a ‘tipping point’.

Booking

This seminar is free to attend with no need to register in advance.

We warmly encourage you to join with your friends, colleagues and classmates.

Join this seminar online on Thursday 11th March at 12pm

Speaker bio

Dr. Himanshu Jha teaches in the Department of Political Science at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University, Germany.

He holds a

• PhD from the National University of Singapore;
• M.Phil in Public Policy from the Australian National University;
• Masters in Political Science from Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi
• Bachelors degree in History (Hons.) from the University of Delhi.

His research focuses on institutional change, governance and development, politics of accountability, state capacity and bureaucratic rationality.

Dr.Jha’s most recent book titled Capturing Institutional Change: the Case of the Right to Information Act in India (Oxford University Press) explores the why, how and what of institutional change using a historical institutional lens. Building on the current body of work he has further probed institutional progression and its deepening at the sub-national level.

His field-work in the eastern Indian state of Bihar examines the emerging politics of accountability and shows that the Right To Information has opened a new space of accountability giving rise to a new form of citizen agency, whose practitioners he term as ‘agents of accountability’.

Dr. Jha has published in leading peer reviewed journals.