On Organizing Euiqty: Are Solutions Really the Problem?

Ensuring a fair distribution of public resources has remained a concern of planners and socially conscious academists for a long time. The limitation of market forces in catering to such needs of people which at current level of deprivation and scale cannot become ‘reasonable’ demand is well recognized. However the obstacles which come in the way of organizing equity are not only the social structure, bureaucratic inertia and political will. The explicit and implicit assumptions behind various dominant paradigm legitimized attempts of state to organize equity. The paper presents an alternative socio-ecological paradigm for public policy analysis and provides illustration of author’s own encounters with planners of various levels. The difference between ‘feasible politics’ and ‘politics of making alternatives feasible’ is also attempted to be resolved with the help of this framework.