The ANU South Asia Research Institute Book Adda is a recurring seminar series that showcases the work of the SARI members within the ANU working on political, social, historical, and cultural issues in South Asia, with the goal of encouraging greater exchange, collaboration, and networking amongst the research community.

Colonizing and social policy: A bureaucratic regime approach to analysing social policy in South Asia from the colonial to the post-colonial era

Palgrave Macmillan, 2026

Abstract

This book examines the development of social policy in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan through the framework of bureaucratic regimes. It traces the institutional continuity from the colonial Indian Civil Service to its post-colonial successors - the Bangladesh Administrative Service, the Indian Administrative Service, and the Pakistan Administrative Service - revealing how these enduring structures have shaped social policies, influenced welfare outcomes, and reinforced social inequalities. Adopting a comparative historical institutionalist approach, the book advances theoretical and empirical understanding and offers a fresh perspective on welfare regimes in the Global South. The book will be of particular value to scholars of social policy, political science, development studies, and public administration, as well as to policymakers and international organizations committed to reforming government structures for more inclusive and equitable welfare systems.

About the book author

Zahid Mumtaz is a Senior Lecturer in Public Policy at the Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University (ANU), and a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). His research focuses on social policy, governance, public administration, and development in the Global South, alongside the application of classical and quantum machine learning to policy analysis. He is the author of Informal Social Protection and Poverty (Springer, 2022) and the recently published Colonization and Social Policy: A Bureaucratic Regime Approach to Analysing Social Policy in South Asia from the Colonial to the Post-Colonial Era (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026). His research has appeared in leading international journals, including the Journal of Social Policy, Journal of European Social Policy, Social Policy & Administration, Critical Social Policy, The Journal of Asian Studies, and IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems.

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Contact the host of SARI 'Book Adda' with Zahid Mumtaz