Although policy makers are increasingly turning to civil society institutions, such as Community-Based Organizations (CBOs), for urban infrastructure and service provision, scholars and policy makers still know little about the potential of these organizations for program implementation and management. This dissertation seeks to address gaps in research on CBOs, in the context of women's empowerment and urban anti-poverty programs in India, by introducing a socio-spatial conceptual model that shows how organizational empowerment may serve as the crucial element in civil society organizational sustainability. Organizational empowerment is defined as a process and outcome of social, spatial, and gendered relations. To examine this model, the dissertation studies CBOs affiliated with the Ahmedabad Slum Networking Project (SNP), a project internationally recognized as a "best practice" in decentralized service delivery.

The primary hypothesis is that it is a CBO's ability to make choices and act on them across multiple sectors and scales that determines sustainability. The mixed methods approach includes interviews with staff of nongovernmental and municipal agencies affiliated with the project and a survey of 300 CBO members. Qualitative coding and multivariate statistical models are used to examine this hypothesis.

Study results highlight potential strengths and pitfalls of CBOs for providing urban social service and infrastructure provision. Results indicate that the built form and geographical scale of influence both have a strong association with organizational viability. Regression analysis indicates that CBOs with formal, dedicated office space are 81 times more likely to remain active, and CBOs with greater numbers of women are four times more likely to remain active. Qualitative analysis indicates, however, that organizational sustainability and women's empowerment via participation are not necessarily synonymous.

This dissertation provides important research directions and policy implications for international donors seeking to invest in civil society organizations. The built environment and scale of activity deserve further scrutiny to develop appropriately sited, physical spaces for organizational activity. Further, financial investment in women's empowerment needs to be made over the life of a project so that CBOs can sustain urban social and infrastructure services.