Population ecology of interest groups in India: a basis for comparative framework

Abstract

The interest groups’ population ecology studies have historically been heavily weighted toward Western democracies. Despite being one of the world’s largest country and democracy, with established qualitative research on business groups India remains relatively elusive in this field of research. Although, interest groups are recognised elsewhere as an important voice on socio-political matters, our knowledge of interest groups system in India, groups’ number and activities, especially post 1991 reforms, is quite limited. Whilst there are individual analyses (e.g. on controversial coal projects and groups participation, or a predominant focus on business associations), their narrative approach to studying advocacy limits the reliability of the results. This article addresses this problem by deploying Western metric framework of studying interest groups population to the analysis of interest groups in India. We test the approach searching for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in India’s environmental policy across three neighbouring states: Chhattisgarh, Odisha & West Bengal. After the deployment of the framework, we ask about pitfalls of the approach, lesson we learned and how it can be improved to further facilitate the comparisons, but also to better understand the actors and the dynamics of groups’ activities?