How do participants in school governance govern rights-based policies to education? In north Karnataka, India, School Development and Management Committees (SDMCs) are legal governance bodies where marginalised, resource-poor citizens can govern school affairs and enact school development goals. India's 2009 Right to Education not only focuses on development goals, but also emphasises a rights-based approach that implicates notions of childhood and discourses of children's rights. Therefore,

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... ool governance is also bound up with governing the rights attached to the right to education. The dual nature of governance-its potential for emphasising structural inequality as well as its capacity for social empowerment- signify a middle ground, where perils coexist with promise. In this dissertation, I investigate the practice of school development and child rights governance in two government schools, one rural, one urban in Kalaburagi, north Karnataka. Taking a theoretical approach that fuses key developments in the studies of governance and childhood, I concentrate on eliciting narratives of the bottom-up practice of governance from resource poor parents, children, teachers, and activists. Designing a qualitative methodology to elicit these narratives, I relied on a variety of research methods: group and individual interviews, observations, fieldnotes, and arts-based interviews during two phases of research in the field spanning three months and two weeks in total. Through thematic analysis of prevalent patterns in participants' accounts, I found that while governance demanded much effort and commitment from participants, they rationalised their efforts (and governance failures) through a discourse of care. Care for children was instrumental in helping participants navigate the middle ground of governance, preserve their motivation, and orient their practice.