I argue that subnational projects need to be taken seriously in the literature on IPE, using a global history of the Kerala model. Contesting nation-statist perspectives within most accounts of global governance, I draw from global history and relational sociology of knowledge to highlight that objects of governance emerged through a wide range of dizzying connections, encounters and relations between diverse political and intellectual projects articulated in multiple sites, cultivated through global scholarly networks, fostered by social movements and state power. I demonstrate this empirically by highlighting how the project of Kerala’s developmental sub-nationalism was instrumental in the constitution of development as a governance object, focussing on the basic needs approach in the seventies. Kerala is a state in the Southwestern part of India and has always been a space of fascination on account of its continuing long-standing Communist and left-wing struggles (considered anomalous against the hegemonic landscape of Nehruvian-Gandhian as well as the current Hindutva projects across India). I argue that a developmentalist egalitarianism was central to the ethos of the subnationalism of Kerala which resulted in a project that was shaped by the tensions associated with the co-existence subnational pride and anxieties of national belonging manifested in a wide range of social movements and political-epistemological alliances. These tensions were instrumental in the forging of multiple articulations of the Kerala model, which in turn were instrumental in the shaping of various objects of expertise associated with governance object of development including the basic needs approach in the 70s.
