What Factors Influence the Performance of Women Leaders in Urban Local Bodies? A Study of Two Municipalities in West Bengal

Riya Bhattacharya ()
Additional contact information
Riya Bhattacharya: Ph.D. Scholar, Centre for Decentralisation and Development, Institute for Social and Economic Change

Chapter Chapter 7 in Women Leadership, Decentralised Governance and Development, 2024, pp 115-135 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Women are constantly denied their rights and their capabilities are questioned in different socio-political spheres. Although society puts hindrances in the form of patriarchy and norms, women leaders come forward to take part in the public sphere. Their leadership is however found to have different forms ranging from proxy workers to independent leaders, especially in urban areas, where social constraints are thought to be relatively flexible. Against this background, this chapter evaluates the performances of elected women representatives in peri-urban Kolkata. Following Moser’s gender-sensitive analysis method, the chapter discusses the performance of elected women representatives (EWRs) in the fulfilment of practical and strategic needs of women and factors that influence their performance. This chapter finds that EWRs are working to serve society as well as fulfil of gender-sensitive needs depending on their leadership quality, which varies on the basis of whether they are from the background of social workers, political leaders or party representatives. The main factors influencing their performance are their will, attitude to their duties at home and outside and their political upbringing. Therefore, to make the strategic plan effective, the mode of training must be altered to introduce innovative methods for building leadership capacity and sense of responsibility among the local leaders.

Keywords: Elected women representatives; Urban local government; Reservation; Participation; Decision-making; Women leadership (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:isbchp:978-981-97-3709-3_7

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9789819737093

DOI: 10.1007/978-981-97-3709-3_7

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in India Studies in Business and Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().